Mirjam Dür was born in Vienna, Austria, where she received a M.Sc. degree in Mathematics from the University of Vienna in 1996. She received a PhD in applied mathematics from University of Trier in 1999. After that, she worked as an assistant professor at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, as a junior professor at TU Darmstadt, as an Universitair Docent at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and as a professor of Nonlinear Optimization in Trier. Since October 2017, she is a professor of Mathematical Optimization in Augsburg. Her research interests include global optimization, quadratic and combinatorial optimization, conic optimization and matrix theory.

Prof. Dür was a plenary speaker at several conferences, among others she was an invited speaker at the 8th European Congress of Mathematics in 2021. She is a Senior Editor of the journal Optimization Methods and Software, and a member of the editorial boards of the journals Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Journal of Global Optimization, and  of the book series Springer Briefs in Optimization. In 2010, she was awarded a  VICI-grant by the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and in 2012 a  GIF Research grant by the  German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development. She is a former principal investigator and now member of the Scientific Advisory Board in the  Research Training Group Algorithmic Optimization at the University of Trier.