Rachel Ward is the W.A. ``Tex” Moncrief Distinguished Professor in Computational Engineering and Sciences — Data Science and Professor of Mathematics at UT Austin. She is recognized for her contributions to stochastic gradient descent, compressive sensing, and randomized linear embeddings. From 2017-2018, Dr. Ward was a visiting researcher at Facebook AI Research. Prior to joining UT Austin in 2011, Dr. Ward received the PhD in Computational and Applied Mathematics at Princeton in 2009 and was a Courant Instructor at the Courant Institute, NYU, from 2009-2011. Among her awards are the Sloan research fellowship, NSF CAREER award, 2016 IMA prize in mathematics and its applications, 2020 Simons fellowship in mathematics. She is also an invited speaker at the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians.