She received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2011 under the supervision of Bernd Sturmfels, and went on to a postdoctoral position at the University of Michigan. Generally, Cynthia enjoys connections between algebra, combinatorics, and convexity. Her work involves the real algebraic structure of convex bodies (spectrahedra) and polynomials (real stable polynomials) arising in optimization and matrix theory. http://www4.ncsu.edu/~clvinzan/