Melody Tung Chan is an American mathematician and violinist who works as Associate Professor of Mathematics at Brown University.
Her research involves combinatorial commutative algebra, graph theory, and tropical geometry.
At Yale she played violin in the Yale Symphony Orchestra,[2] won a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship[5] and the university's Hart Lyman Prize for best junior student, and became vice president of the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
[4][7] Chan conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University from 2012 to 2015, and then joined Brown as Manning Assistant Professor in 2015.
[8] She is the 2020 winner of the AWM–Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory, "in recognition of Chan’s advances at the interface between algebraic geometry and combinatorics", including "an astounding result" on the cohomology of moduli spaces, "foundational work on the moduli of metric graphs and tropical curves", and "beautiful new results on the expected number of turns in a random Young tableau".