Eleny Ionel

Eleny-Nicoleta Ionel (born April 1969) is a Romanian mathematician whose research concerns symplectic geometry, including the study of the Gromov–Witten invariants and Gopakumar–Vafa invariants. Among her most significant results are the proofs of Gopakumar-Vafa conjectures (joint with Thomas H. Parker et. al.), and the proof of Getzler's conjecture, asserting vanishing in codimension at least g of the tautological ring of the moduli space of genus-g curves.

She is a professor of mathematics at Stanford University, where she was chair of the mathematics department from 2016 to 2019.

Education and career
Ionel is from Iași. She is the daughter of Adrian Ionel, a professor at the Ion Ionescu de la Brad University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Iași. She attended the prestigious Costache Negruzzi National College, graduating in 1987. She earned a bachelor's degree from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in 1991, and completed her Ph.D. in 1996 from Michigan State University. Her dissertation, Genus One Enumerative Invariants in $$\mathbf{P}^n$$, was supervised by Thomas H. Parker.

After postdoctoral research at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California and a position as C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty in 1998, and moved to Stanford in 2004.

Recognition
Ionel is a Sloan Research Fellow and a Simons Fellow. She was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002. She was selected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the 2020 Class, for "contributions to symplectic geometry and the geometric analysis approach to Gromov–Witten Theory".