Biography

Professor Courtney Gibbons wants to change the world. From stumping for Dukakis-Bentsen ‘88 as a first-grader and mailing her first one-pager to the White House when President George H. W. Bush came out as anti-broccoli in the early ’90s, she has never been afraid to speak up on something that matters to her. Though her early efforts to effect political—and vegetable—change were not successful, she’s gotten better with practice.

A mathematician and policy worker with experience in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, Dr. Gibbons is a professor of mathematics at Hamilton College, where she joined the faculty in July 2013.

In the 2023–2024 academic year, Dr. Gibbons was a fellow hosted at the National Science Foundation in the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering Directorate, Intelligent Systems Division, as an AI policy fellow through the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowships program. In the 2022–2023 academic year, she was a legislative branch fellow working for the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, covering parts of the portfolio related to federal data, artificial intelligence, and federal financial assistance.

In her life as a mathematician, Professor Gibbons studies commutative and homological algebra, and her primary research interest is the study of infinite free resolutions, often through the lens of Boij–Söderberg theory. Professor Gibbons has supervised many commutative algebra undergraduate research projects at Hamilton, the Willamette Valley Mathematics Consortium REU, and the COURAGE virtual REU. She currently serves on the American Mathematical Society’s Committee on Science Policy.

Daughter of a jazz musician and public-school teacher, Professor Gibbons grew up near New Haven, Connecticut. She attended public schools in West Haven, Woodbridge, and Bethany and earned her diploma from Amity High School in 2000. In 2006, she graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in mathematics with distinction from Colorado College. She subsequently worked for the college’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science for a year as a paraprofessional. In 2009 and 2013, respectively, she earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

In addition to being a multiply certified math nerd and a reformed college dropout, Professor Gibbons likes to rock climb, argue about notation, and snuggle with cats.