Vanessa Robins is an Australian applied mathematician whose research interests include computational topology, image processing, and the structure of granular materials. She is a fellow in the departments of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Australian National University, where she was ARC Future Fellow from 2014 to 2019.^[1]

Robins earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at Australian National University in 1994.^[1] She completed a PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2000. Her dissertation, Computational Topology at Multiple Resolutions: Foundations and Applications to Fractals and Dynamics, was jointly supervised by James D. Meiss and Elizabeth Bradley.^[2]

One of Robins's publications, from 1999, is one of the three works that independently introduced persistent homology in topological data analysis.^[3] As well as working on mathematical research, she has collaborated with artist Julie Brooke, of the Australian National University School of Art & Design, on the mathematical visualization of topological surfaces.^[4]