Laura Wakelin

This year, I am based at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), where my mentor is Prof. Lisa Piccirillo. 

I am currently on leave from my Heilbronn Research Fellowship at King's College London (KCL), where my mentor is Dr Mehdi Yazdi. 

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik (MPIM) in Bonn, Germany, where my mentor was Dr Arunima Ray. 

I completed my PhD at Imperial College London in September 2023 via the London School of Geometry and Number Theory (LSGNT). My advisor was Dr Steven Sivek. I was awarded the Yael Naim Dowker Prize for the best mathematics PhD thesis. 

I am interested in many aspects of low-dimensional topology, including characterising and non-characterising slopes, cosmetic surgeries, hyperbolic 3-manifolds, slice knots and multisections of 4-manifolds. 

Here is my CV (last updated: July 2025).