Bernd Sturmfels received doctoral degrees in mathematics from the University of Washington, Seattle, and the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, in 1987. After postdoctoral years in Minneapolis and Linz, Austria, he taught at Cornell University and then joined UC Berkeley in 1995, where he is professor of mathematics, statistics and computer science.

His honors include a National Young Investigator Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, a Clay Senior Scholarship, an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Prize, the SIAM von Neumann Lecturership, and a Sarlo Distinguished Mentoring Award. Recently, he served as Vice President of the American Mathematical Society.

As an experimentalist among mathematicians, Sturmfels has authored ten books and over 200 research articles in the areas of combinatorics, algebraic geometry, symbolic computation and their applications. He has mentored 35 doctoral students and numerous postdocs. His current research focuses on algebraic statistics and computational algebraic geometry.