Margaret Cheney (born 1955) is an American mathematician whose research involves inverse problems. She is Yates Chair and Professor of Mathematics at Colorado State University.
Cheney graduated from Oberlin College in 1976, with a double major in mathematics and physics. She completed her Ph.D. in 1982 at Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation, Quantum Mechanical Scattering and Inverse Scattering in Two Dimensions, was supervised by Roger G. Newton.
After postdoctoral study at Stanford University, Cheney took a faculty position at Duke University in 1984, and moved to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1988. In 2012 she moved again to Colorado State University as Yates Chair.
In 2000, Cheney became the inaugural Lise Meitner Visiting Professor at Lund University.
Cheney was elected as a SIAM Fellow in 2009 "for contributions to inverse problems in acoustics and electromagnetic theory". In 2012, Oberlin College gave her an honorary doctorate.