Advising

  Grad Advising

• Becky Eastham (PhD, 2024) First position: Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Riverside

• Mateo Morales (PhD student at UW-Madison)

• Dylan Jamner (MA student at UW-Madison)

Undergrad Advising

During the Fall 2023 semester I mentored Eton Tackett, an undergraduate math major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a reading course with me working through a proof of the classification of surfaces using these notes. 

We explored 1-bridge braids (an interesting and important class of positive braid knots) and their quantitative properties. This project explicitly determined the braid index of these knots in terms of their defining parameters.

Here is a video of their final presentation along with their (beautiful!) slideshow. It includes the motivation for the project, a summary of their results, and an amazing animation!

Here is their poster presentation from the 2022 (virtual) JMM:

Although the summer of 2021 was my first time designing and running my own undergraduate REU, I have been engaged in mentoring undergraduate research for some time:

• Summer 2019 - I was the postdoc mentor for the MSRI-UP undergraduate summer research program in algebraic combinatorics

• Summer 2018 - I was a graduate student mentor for the Summer@ICERM undergraduate summer research program

  • Project 1: Automorphisms of the k-curve graph

  • Project 2: Length and self-intersection numbers of geodesics in hyperbolic surfaces

• Spring 2017 - I was a graduate student mentor for the Illinois Geometry Lab 

  • Project: Veech Jigsaws