Postdocs
First the Postdocs who worked with Professor Sormani officially:
Zahra Sinaei (MSRI, Fall 2013, while I was serving MSRI as a visiting research professor)
Zahra earned her doctorate from Lausanne in 2013 having completed research on harmonic maps and Gromov-Hausdorff convergence with Professor Troyonov. She came to MSRI as part of the Fall 2013 Optimal Transport Program. I was a Visiting Research Professor at MSRI that semester and was assigned to mentor her. She participated in the Converging Spaces Reading Seminar I organized and prepared her dissertation for publication as two papers. We've completed a joint project related to intrinsic flat convergence and covering spaces while she was a postdoc at Courant working with Professor Cheeger funded by the SNF. She was next a postdoc at Northwestern University and is now employed at U Mass Amherst.
Carlos Vega (CUNY, Spring 2014, funded by my NSF grant for a one semester research postdoc)
Carlos earned his doctorate from the University of Miami in 2013 having completed research on splitting theorems in Lorentzian geometry with Professor Galloway. He was then a postdoc at MSRI in the Fall 2013 General Relativity Program where I met him. I told him about a project I was working on concerning the convergence of Lorentzian manifolds. He joined the project with some interesting ideas. I was able to hire him to come to CUNY to work with me funded by my NSF grant in Spring 2013. Together we discovered a distance on Lorentzian manifolds that we call the null distance which might aid in the notion of a convergence of Lorentzian manifolds. The first paper concerning this notion has been completed. Carlos next served as a lecturer at St. Louis University working with Professor Harris and then at SUNY Binghamton, before returning to the University of Miami.
Other mathematicians who worked with Professor Sormani when they were postdocs:
Stefan Wenger (Courant, Fribourg)
Stefan earned his doctorate from ETH Zurich in 2004 having completed research on Isoperimetric Inequalities with Prof. Lang. He then wrote a series of papers applying Ambrosio-Kirchheim's theory of integral currents on metric spaces and Gromov's theory of filling volumes while working as a postdoc at Courant Institute. He presented this work at CUNY and we began our project together to define an intrinsic flat convergence for Riemannian manifolds in the last few years of his postdoc. We announced the work in 2008 and I was invited to present it at the Geometry Festival in 2009. After some delays when Stefan relocated to start his first tenure track job, the results were ultimately published in two joint papers. Stefan also proved an important compactness theorem for intrinsic flat convergence and published this work as a solo paper. Stefan Wenger is now a professor at the University of Fribourg and was a speaker at the ICM in the Summer of 2014.
Chen-Yun Lin (U Conn, Taipei, Toronto, Duke, CUNY)
Chen-Yun earned her doctorate from Columbia in 2010 having completed work with Professor Wang on Hamilton's Ricci flow and the Bartnik Conjecture. She spoke at MSRI in Fall 2013 and we discussed possible extensions of this work and its relationship to my work with Dan Lee concerning the almost rigidity or stability of the Schoen-Yau Positive Mass Theorem. She visited CUNY in January 2014 and we completed the project in the summer of 2014. After a postdoc at the University of Toronto and a postdoc Duke University, Chen-Yun Lin is now a tenure track Assistant Professor at Lehman College at CUNY.
Jacobus Portegies (Max Plank, Eindhoven)
Jacobus earned his doctorate from Courant in 2014 having completed a paper related to eigenvalues and intrinsic flat convergence as part of his dissertation under Fanghua Lin. He was an active participant in my reading seminar as a doctoral student. We coauthored on a paper on properties of intrinsic flat convergence long distance while he was a postdoc at Max Plank in Leipzig working under Jost. Now he is a tenure track assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology.
Anna Sakovich (U Vienna, Uppsala)
Anna earned her doctorate at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 2013 with Mattias Dahl as her main advisor having completed research concerning the Positive Mass Theorem on asymptotically Hyperbolic manifolds. She was a postdoc at MSRI when I was a visiting research professor there and participated in my Converging Spaces Reading Seminar. She then had postdocs at Max Plank Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm with Ulrich Menne and at the University of Vienna with Michael Eichmair. We have completed a paper on the almost rigidity of the positive mass theorem in the spherically symetric asymptotically hyperbolic setting and are currently working on spacetime intrinsic flat convergence. She is now an Associate Professor at Uppsala University .
Brian Allen (USMA, Hartford)
Brian earned his doctorate from U Tennessee in 2016 under the advisement of Alex Freire. His doctoral research was on inverse mean curvature flow. As a postdoc at USMA he joined the workshops I supervised at the CUNY Graduate Center and began applying his expertice towards proving almost rigidity of the Positive Mass Theorem in the setting where the inverse mean curvature flow is smooth. His first paper in this direction was accepted by Annales Henri Poincare, he has a second on the arxiv. In addition Brian lead a team of doctoral students studying the warped product setting of Gromov's Scalar Torus Almost Rigidity Conjecture which completed a paper together. He has been working on the relationship between $L^p$ convergence, GH convergence, and intrinsic flat convergence. We have completed two joint papers in this direction and are working on a third joint paper with Raquel Perales applying these results. After a few years at Hartford College, Brian is now a tenure track Assistant Professor at Lehman College.
Demetre Kazaras (SCGP, Duke)
Demetre earned his doctorate from U Oregon in 2017 under the advisement of Boris Botvinnik. His doctoral research was on scalar curvature, conformal geometry and bordisms. He was a postdoc at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook when we met. We have completed a paper with examples of sequences with positive scalar curvature jointly with my old doctoral student Jorge Basilio and a paper developing the notion of smocked metric spaces with undergraduate assistants. We are currently writing a paper on the SWIF limits of smocked spaces which we will then apply to a question of Gromov on scalar curvature. Demetre was next a postdoc at Duke University and is now tenure track at Michigan State.
Melanie Graf (Tuebingen)
Melanie earned her doctorate from the University of Vienna in 2018. Her doctoral research is on Lorentzian Geometry. I first met her through email communication when Professor James Grant suggested she might answer some questions I had about volumes in spacetimes satisfyinging the Einstein Equation. In the end we completed a paper estimating the volumes in maximal developments satisfying the dominant energy condition depending on integral bounds on the mean curvature of the initial data sets.
Wenchuan Tian (UC Santa Barbara)
Wenchuan earned his doctorate from Michigan State University under the advisement of Xiaodong Wang in 2021. He first began working on one of my Fields Institute research teams in 2017. His team completed a paper proving the Scalar Compactness Conjecture in the warped product setting in 2018. He has continued working on proving this conjecture in more general cases with Changliang Wang and I after completing his doctorate.
Teams of postdocs and doctoral students at the Fields Institute (Summer 2017)
* Penrose Almost Rigidity Team
* Warped Tori Almost Rigidity Team
* Ricci Flow and Intrinsic Flat Convergence Team
* Almost Rigidity of Graphs over Tori Team
* Rotationally Symmetric Scalar Compactness Team
Future Postdoctoral Collaborators:
If you think you would like to work with me on a project, contact me, send me your vita and links to arxiv preprints of yours, and tell me what kind of project you are interested in. I'll suggest a paper or two to read related to the potential project, which you can present at my reading seminar, and then we can meet to chat. If we coauthor on a project, we will be keeping a running tex file of our conjectures, possible theorems, possible lemmas which can lead to proofs of those theorems and will each contribute to the proofs at every stage.
Alternatively, I may just recommend a project and occasionally chat with you about ideas and look over your progress without actually coauthoring. I might pair two postdocs to work together or a postdoc to work with a doctoral student and suggest a problem for you to work on together with some guidance from me. Note I am especially interested in working with young people who know Geometric Measure Theory and General Relativity and am happy to train anyone in metric and Riemannian geometry.
Doctoral students who have worked with me are listed here.