Yvonne Lai is an expert in the field of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching. Her current research program seeks to improve the education of secondary mathematics teachers and early college students by bridging disciplinary perspectives from mathematics, education, and engineering. She has been an investigator or co-investigator on projects receiving a total of nearly $9M in funding. Her collaborators include those from The Algebra Project, the Educational Testing Service, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. Lai is a member of the National Academies Mathematical Sciences Education Board, chair elect of the US National Commission on Mathematics Instruction, Vice President of the Mathematical Association of America, and a member at large on the Council of the AMS. She was a Steering Committee member of the CBMS Mathematical Education of Teachers, III, past chair of the MAA’s Committee on the Mathematical Education of Teachers, and founding chair of the MAA’s Special Interest Group on Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, an organization with now over 200 members, to support mathematics faculty invested in teacher education. She is Vice Chair of the Board of the Mathematical Foundation of America, which oversees the Canada/USA Mathcamp for high school students, where she was previously an instructor and a student. Lai received the 2025 AMS Award for Impact on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics and the 2025 MAA Haimo Award. Her work has been published in Cognition & Instruction, Educational Studies in Mathematics, and For the Learning of Mathematics. She received her S.B. Mathematics from MIT and a PhD in mathematics specializing in hyperbolic geometry and geometric group theory, supervised by Misha Kapovich, at UC Davis. She was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Michigan working with Dick Canary and then with Deborah Ball and Hyman Bass.
Awards, etc.: See professional bio page.
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