Maria Chudnovsky received her B.A. and M.Sc. form the Technion, and a PhD from Princeton University in 2003. Currently she is an associate professor at Columbia University. Before that she was a Veblen Research Instructor at Princeton University and the IAS, and then an assistant professor at Princeton. Until April 2008 she was a Clay Mathematics Institute research fellow. Her research interests are in graph theory and combinatorial optimization. A few years ago, she was a part of a team of four researchers that proved the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem, a forty year old conjecture, that had been a well known open problem in both graph theory and combinatorial optimization. For this work she was awarded the Fulkerson Prize (jointly with the rest of the team).