Virginia Vassilevska Williams received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. She is currently an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University. In the 2008-2009 academic year, she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. From 2009 to 2011, she was a postdoc in the computer science department at UC Berkeley, supported by a Computing Innovations Fellowship. From 2011 to 2013, she was an assistant research engineer at UC Berkeley and a research associate at Stanford. Her research is broadly in the design and analysis of algorithms, focusing on problems in graphs (such as shortest paths) and matrices (such as computing matrix products). She also has an interest in computational social choice.