Before coming to Smith, Patricia Cahn was a Hans Rademacher Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics.

Her research is in geometric and low-dimensional topology. A main theme of her work is using algebraic invariants to detect information about intersections and linking of topological objects. In particular, she has studied curves on surfaces, linking of knots in 3-manifolds and knot theory under geometric constraints, including contact topology.

Aside from mathematics, she enjoys playing the double bass.