Monica Vazirani is Professor of Mathematics at UC Davis.Vazirani studies combinational representation theory and her area of expertise is the representation theory of Hecke algebras and Khovanov-Lauda-Rouquier (KLR) algebras. She studies KLR irreducible representations, which are the most basic objects whose symmetries are encoded in these algebras. Vazirani received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1999.