Research

My main areas of research are representation theory of Lie algebras, categorification, and its applications to low dimensional topology. I am also interested in representation theoretic questions about affine Hecke algebras, Lie superalgebras, and quantum groups. Various quantum invariants of knots and 3-manifolds such as the Jones polynomial and Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev invariant possess important integrality properties. The idea of categorification is that these integral structures should arise naturally as Euler characteristics of homological invariants of these objects. These homological invariants contain more structure than the classical invariants and their functoriality should lead to invariants of higher dimensional objects such as a cobordism between two knots or a 4-manifold when viewed as a cobordism between two 3-manifolds. The challenge is to find concrete examples which give powerful topological invariants. 

Recently I have become interested in quantum computation and specifically applications of TQFTs towards this subject.

Papers

Notes