Dr. Mandi A. Schaeffer Fry

(AKA "A.A. Schaeffer Fry")

Welcome to Dr. Mandi’s webpage!

I am a (full) Professor of Mathematics at the University of Denver. Before coming to DU, I was a (full) Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Metropolitan State University of Denver and am still an affiliate professor there. I started at DU in Sept 2023, was granted tenure and promotion to Associate in Sept 2024, and was promoted to full professor effective Sept 2025.

I’m a dedicated educator, but am also an active researcher in my area of groups and character theory. (See research and teaching links above for more info!)

Editorial Boards:

Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra (Mar 2026--)
Journal of Group Theory (July 2026--)
Communications in Algebra (2021--2026*)
- *The editorial board resigned en masse on March 10, 2026. Here is an article from Retraction Watch. I continue to handle the final papers in my editorial queue there.

In case you're curious, click the down button for an at-a-glance view of my perhaps not-so-conventional career trajectory!

MSU Denver is a mission-driven, primarily undergraduate, commuter institution in downtown Denver. I began there in August 2014 as Assistant Professor, and was granted early tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in May 2018, and was promoted to Full Professor in May 2022. In Fall 2023, I made the move to University of Denver. While I miss my students and colleagues at MSU Denver, I am loving DU and am excited to be part of a research-active department! Although I am leaving for a more research-driven culture (and to have graduate students!), I will always be extremely proud to have worked at MSU Denver, and would not trade my past experiences with their diverse, interesting, nontraditional student body for anything!

Before MSU Denver, I spent a year at Michigan State University as a Visiting Assistant Professor (Postdoc) in the Department of Mathematics, working with Professor Jon Hall. Before that, I did my B.S. (2009) and Ph.D. (2013) in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona. My Ph.D. thesis was supervised by Professor Pham Huu Tiep, who is now at Rutgers University, and I defended my dissertation on April 3, 2013. I also did an honors thesis during my B.S., which was supervised by Professor Klaus Lux at UA. (For more specifics about my research, see my research page!)

Some Exciting Upcoming Activities

August 2026:

Giving an invited talk at the conference "Representations of Finite Groups and Related Structures" at UC Santa Cruz in honor of Robert Boltje, Aug. 3-7, 2026.

September 2026

Giving an invited talk at the conference "Characters and Blocks in València" at Universitat de València, Sept 2-4, 2026.

November 2026:

Participating in the workshop "Interactions between Representations of Finite and p-adic Groups" at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (MFO) in Oberwolfach, Germany, Nov. 8-13, 2026. The week before, participating (with L. Ruhstorfer and J. Taylor) in an Oberwolfach Research Fellows research stay at MFO.

March 2027:

Participating in the workshop "Representations of Finite Groups" at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach in Oberwolfach, Germany, Mar. 7-12, 2027.

August 2027:

Giving a plenary talk at Groups St. Andrews in St. Andrews, U.K., Aug. 1-7, 2027.

Blasts from the past! (Jan '24 and on)

June 2026:

Gave an invited talk in the workshop "Groups, representations, and cohomology" at the International Center for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) in Edinburgh, U.K., June 8-12, 2026.

May 2026:

Spoke at the Zassenhaus Groups and Friends conference at Kent State University in Ohio, May 30-31, 2026.

April 2026:

Gave the Case Lecture at the Mathematics Award Ceremony at St. Louis University, April 24, 2026.

March 2026:

Gave an Algebra and Number Theory Seminar at UC Santa Cruz on March 6, 2026.
Gave an Algebra Seminar at Rutgers on March 11, 2026.
Spoke in an AMS Special Session on ``Algebraic, combinatorial and geometric aspects of representation theory" March 28-29 in Savannah, GA.

January 2026:

Took a group of three DU undergraduates to the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Wisdom in Mathematics, Jan 29-Feb 1, 2026.

October 2025:

Organized an AMS Special Session Oct 17-18 in St. Louis, with Dr. Julianne Rainbolt
Organized a workshop for junior researchers: "GNaT Jr": https://sites.google.com/view/gnatjr/ here at DU!

September 2025:

Gave a 3-lecture series on representation theory of groups of Lie type at the graduate summer school in Wuppertal, Germany https://sites.google.com/view/rofgarg/home

August 2025:

Organized an AMS Special Session Aug 23-24 here at DU, with Drs. Dan Nakano and John McHugh

May 2025:

Spoke at the AWM Research Symposium in Madison (May 16-18), twice!
- A 40-min talk in the special session on Category Theory, Algebras, and Representation Theory
- A 20-min talk in the special session on Groups, Representation Theory, and their related structures

April 2025:

Gave a featured talk at the Souther Regional Algebra Conference in Lafayette, Louisiana, April 4-6, 2025.

March 2025:

Hosted visiting researcher Lucas Ruhstorfer from Wuppertal, Germany - March 9-23, 2025.
The third and final visit to AIM for a SQuaRE on the Galois--McKay conjecture (with Olivier Brunat, Rishi Nath, Lucas Ruhstorfer, Britta Späth, Jay Taylor, and Ryan Vinroot).

January 2025:

Spoke at the conference "VII Congreso de jóvenes investigadores de la RSME" in Bilbao, Spain, Jan 13-17, 2025.
Visited collaborators Noelia Rizo, Alex Moretó, Miquel Martínez, and Gabriel Navarro in Valencia Jan 20-30, 2025.

Gave a main talk at the Conference "Characters and Blocks of Finite Groups: Celebrating Gabriel Navarro's 60th Birthday" in Valencia, Spain, Jan 30-31, 2025.

December 2024:

Hosted research collaborator Jay Taylor Dec 9-13, who visted from Manchester, UK.

October 2024:

Would have spoken at the AMS Special Session "Algebraic, combinatorial and geometric aspects of representation theory." at the AMS Eastern Sectional Meeting in Savannah, Georgia, Oct 5-6, 2024, but cancelled due to hurricane damage.
Organized an AMS Special Session "Finite groups, their representations, and related structures", at the AMS Western Sectional Meeting in Riverside, California, Oct 26-27, 2024.

August 2024:

Organized Conference "Group Theory and Its Neighboring Disciplines, a Conference in Honor of Jon Hall's 75th Birthday" at University of Denver, Aug 16-18, 2024.
Hosted visiting collaborator Nguyen Hung from University of Akron.

May 2024:

Gave an invited address at the AMS Western Sectional Meeting Spring 2024 in San Francisco, CA, May 4, 2024. This was one of the best experiences of my career! (Aside from the mid-talk cough attack, of course...)
Organized Special Session "Groups and Representations" at the AMS Western Sectional Meeting Spring 2024 in San Francisco, CA, May 4-5, 2024.
Hosted visiting collaborators Noelia Rizo from Valencia, Spain and Miquel Martínez from Florence, Italy.

April 2024:

Went "home"! to give a talk in the Algebra and Number Theory Seminar at U. Arizona on April 2, 2024.

March 2024:

Hosted visiting researcher Sonia Petschick, a Ph.D. student in Wuppertal, Germany
Organized Conference "Groups, Nilpotence, and Tensors II" at University of Denver, March 2, 2024.

February 2024:

Gave a main talk at the Southwest Local Algebra Meeting in Norman, OK
Gave a main talk at the China-US Group Theory Summit in Gainseville, FL

January 2024:

Took a mixture of MSU Denver and DU undergraduates to the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics

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