 Advisor: Peter Teichner My Dissertation is finally here in preprint form. The title is "The Classification of Two-Dimensional Extended Topological Field Theories". (Last updated May 16th, 2009). It was featured on Jonathan Baez's This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 275). Group Blog Research: My research centers around three areas of mathematics: topology, higher category theory, and quantum field theory. Recently I have just finished my dissertation which classifies 2-dimensional extended topological field theories in terms of generators and relations. A topological field theory is a functor from a bordism category to some target category and an extended field theory is a higher categorical version of this. Combining some basic results on symmetric monoidal bicategories with a generalization of Cerf theory, I obtain an explicit generators and relations description of the 2-dimensional bordism bicategory, effectively classifying extended 2D TFTs with any target bicategory. This has lead to joint work with Chris Douglas where we extend these results to higher dimensions. I recently gave a talk on this work at Berkeley. Here are the Slides. Another direction my research has turned of late is to the higher categorical geometry of the String group. Recently I managed to construct a finite dimensional model of the String group as a group object in the bicategory of Lie groupoids, left principal bibundles, and bibundle maps. This has lead to some new results in bicategorical homological algebra which I hope to write up soon. I hope this will lead to a better understanding of the geometry of string structures. 
Dr. Christopher Schommer-Pries Papers:
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