I am mainly interested in understanding the topology of smooth 4-manifolds. 

Dimension 4 is special for many reasons: it is small enough to visualize things nicely, but large enough for weird things to happen, and yet not large enough to tame the weirdness. 

I mostly think about 4-manifolds admitting (achiral) Lefschetz fibrations, i.e. essentially surface bundles over surfaces with only a certain type of singularities. Some information about such 4-manifolds can be recovered from 2-dimensional data. I have been motivated by this relationship to study the spin mapping class group of closed, orientable surfaces, in order to retrieve information about spin 4-manifolds.

Papers in preparation