Rate My Professor Alex Fink

Professor Alex Fink is a Professor in Pure Mathematics in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary University of London, where he advanced from Lecturer (2013–2016) and Senior Lecturer (2016–2019) to Reader (2019–2023) before his current professorship in 2023. He heads the Centre for Combinatorics, Algebra and Number Theory. From 2010 to 2013, he held a Research Associate position at North Carolina State University. Fink earned his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, advised by Bernd Sturmfels and Federico Ardila, with the thesis "Matroid polytope subdivisions and valuations." He also holds BSc Honours degrees in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Calgary in 2006.

Fink's research centers on algebraic combinatorics, particularly matroid theory and tropical geometry, at the intersection of combinatorics, commutative algebra, and algebraic geometry. Key publications include "Matroids over a ring" (Journal of the European Mathematical Society, 2016), "Stiefel tropical linear spaces" (Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A, 2015), "Equivariant K-theory classes of matrix orbit closures" (International Mathematics Research Notices, 2022), "Presentations of transversal valuated matroids" (Journal of the London Mathematical Society, 2022), "The omega invariant of a matroid" (International Mathematics Research Notices, 2025), and "The polytope of all matroids" (Selecta Mathematica New Series, 2025). His research has received support from EPSRC grants such as EP/M01245X/1 "Algebra and geometry of matroids" and Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant No. 792432 "Tropical differential geometry." Fink was awarded a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study for 2024/25, held the Berkeley Fellowship (2006–2009) and NSERC Julie Payette PGS M Research Scholarship (2007–2008), and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2015). He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the London Mathematical Society, its Bulletin, Theoretical Computer Science A (since 2014), and Algebraic Combinatorics (since 2023), and was joint chair of the Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics 2017 programme committee.