Laura Wakelin

I am currently a Heilbronn Research Fellow at King's College London (KCL), where my mentor is Dr Mehdi Yazdi. 

I spent a year as an Instructor at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), where my mentor was Prof. Lisa Piccirillo. 

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 toric bridge decompositions of Lagrangians in 4-manifolds. 

Here is my CV (last updated: May 2026).