Eliana Duarte was born in Bogota, Colombia. She obtained her B.S. in Mathematics from Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. Afterwards she did a MA in Binghamton University and then moved to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where she finished her PhD in Mathematics. At that point she moved to Germany to join the Nonlinear Algebra Group at Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences and later she joined the Mathematical Complexity Reduction research training group at Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg.
Eliana’s research interests are in computational commutative algebra. The problems she studies are usually motivated by applications such as Computer Graphics, Algebraic Statistics and Rigidity of structures. It turns out that algebraic methods can give valuable insight to problems in these areas such as understanding their complexity and providing efficient algorithms to perform difficult computations. For her PhD thesis, Eliana studied the implicitization problem for surfaces in space using syzygies. The implicitization problem is of interest in Computer Graphics because it provides a straightforward method to handle geometric operations using a graphics software. Today she works on problems related to maximum likelihood estimation, causality, graphical models and implicitization of toric surfaces.
