My research interests are in low dimensional topology.
I usually think about 4-manifolds and their exotic structures, branched coverings of low dimensional manifolds, nonorientable 4-manifolds, knotted surfaces in 4-manifolds.
Here you can find my complete CV
Publications:
-Valentina Bais, Younes Benyahia, Oliviero Malech and Rafael Torres, "A recipe for exotic 2-links in closed 4-manifolds whose components are topological unknots", Pacific Journal of Mathematics, Volume 338 (2025)
-Valentina Bais and Rafael Torres, "Smooth structures on non-orientable 4-manifolds via twisting operations", Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, Volume 57, Issue 6 (2025)
-Valentina Bais, "On Dold-Whitney's parallelizability of 4-manifolds", Topology and its Applications, Volume 359, Part A, (2025)
-Valentina Bais, Victor Gustavo May Custodio and Rafael Torres, "Existence results of Spin(2,n-1)_0-pseudo-Riemannian cobordisms", Revista de la Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales. Serie A. Matematicas, Volume 118, article number 130, (2024)
-Valentina Bais and Daniele Zuddas, "On Stiefel’s parallelizability of 3-manifolds", Expositiones Mathematicae, Volume 41, Issue 1, 2023, Pages 238-243.
Accepted for publication:
-Valentina Bais, "Pin-structures on non-oriented 4-manifolds via Lefschetz fibrations", arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.01848 (2025). Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Section A: Mathematics.
Oberwolfach workshop report:
Preprints:
- Valentina Bais, Alessio Di Prisa, Daniel Hartman, Chun-Sheng Hsueh, Marc Kegel, Alice Merz, Mark Pencovitch, Arunima Ray, Diego Santoro, Paula Truöl and Laura Wakelin, "On the detection of knotted spheres by their traces in high dimensions". arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.07251 (2025).
-Valentina Bais, Riccardo Piergallini and Daniele Zuddas, "Branched covering representation of non-orientable 4-manifolds", arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.09319 (2025).
-Valentina Bais and Rafael Torres, "A cut-and-paste mechanism to introduce fundamental group and construct new four-manifolds", arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.23167 (2025).
-Valentina Bais, Rafael Torres and Daniele Zuddas, "Some examples of small irreducible exotic 4-manifolds with free abelian fundamental group", arxiv preprint arXiv:2410.06642 (2024).
Invited talks at international conferences:
April 2025 - Manifolds and groups in Bologna, III (UNIBO, Junior speaker)
Title: "Some examples of small irreducible exotic 4-manifolds with free abelian fundamental group"
June 2025 - Conference on Modern Developments in Low-Dimensional Topology (ICTP, Trieste)
October 2025- Conference "Trisections and related topics", Marseille
Title: "Some examples of small irreducible exotic 4-manifolds with free abelian fundamental group"
June 2026 - Combinatorial Algebraic Topology & Applications IV, Pisa
Title: TBA
Seminar talks:
May 2023 -AWM Pitt Grad Seminar
Title: "On Stiefel's parallelizability theorem for closed 3-manifolds" (on zoom)
November 2023-"Baby Geometri" seminar (University of Pisa)
Title: "An exotic structure on a non-orientable 4-manifold via Gluck twisting"
November 2023-TRINO, a 3-fold seminar in Trieste (joint Algebraic Geometry seminar between ICTP, SISSA and UNITS)
Title: "An exotic structure on a non-orientable 4-manifold via Gluck twisting"
November 2024-Algebra and Geometry seminar (University of Genova)
Title: "Constructions or irreducible exotic 4-manifolds with free abelian fundamental group"
January 2025-HF homology seminar (Humboldt University of Berlin) (https://sites.google.com/view/hfhomologyseminar/home)
Title: "Genus Detection in Knot Floer Homology"
January 2025-Working group seminar on geometric topology (Humboldt University of Berlin) (https://sites.google.com/g.ntu.edu.tw/geometrictopology/home)
Title:"Exotic non-orientable 4-manifolds"
December 2025-Glasgow Geometry & Topology Seminar (University of Glasgow)
Title:"Branched covering representation of nonoriantable 4-manifolds"
Contributed talks and short talks:
June 2023-Conference "Geometric Topology, Art and Science" (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)
Title: "Spin structures on pseudo-Riemannian cobordisms" (short talk and poster)
February 2024-Winter braids XIII - School on braids and low dimensional topology (Montpellier)
Title: "An exotic structure on a non-orientable 4-manifold via Gluck twisting" (short talk)
May 2024-Matemale Spring School 2024 - New constructions of exotic 4-manifolds (Matemale)
Title: "Lemmas on HF I" (1h talk)
August 2024-Young Topologists Meeting 2024 (Münster)
Title: "Spin structures on pseudo-Riemannian cobordisms" (short talk)
May 2025-Matemale Spring School 2025 - Kohovanov homology and exotic phenomena (Matemale)
Title: "The Conway knot is not slice"
