Cheri Shakiban received her Ph.D. in 1979 from Brown University in the Formal Calculus of Variations. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she has been a faculty member since 1983, and where she served as the chair of the mathematics department for eight years (1996-2004). She also served as an associate director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota (IMA) for 9 years (2006-2015). In addition to teaching regular math courses, she has taught innovative study abroad courses such as "Mathematics and Mechanics of Architecture in Southern Europe and Peru".
She has publications in diverse areas of mathematics and engineering and has supervised several grants including a grant from National Science Foundation to support under-represented students in the sciences and engineering. Her recent area of research is mostly in computer vision, with applications to object recognition. She loves to work with undergraduate students, and mentor them in doing research in applied mathematics, and encouraging them to give conference presentations and posters, and to submit their work for publication. She is recipient of two awards from the University of St. Thomas for Undergraduate Research and Collaborative Scholarship with students (2005) and the Distinguished Educator Award for mentoring students (2016).