Email: zc431 at cam dot ac dot uk
Office: Cambridge DPMMS E0.13
Welcome to my home page! I'm a Trinity College Junior Research Fellow and Herchel-Smith Postdoctoral Fellow based at Cambridge since October 2025.
Before that, I was a PhD student at MIT, fortunate to be advised by Paul Seidel.
I'm broadly interested in symplectic topology and noncommutative Hodge theory, as well as their interaction with homological mirror symmetry and arithmetic geometry. Some themes in my past projects: Fukaya categories and enumerative geometry in positive characteristic, and applying these techniques to questions in classical Gromov-Witten theory over the complex numbers; arithmetic aspects of homological mirror symmetry; studying differential equations arising in non-commutative Hodge theory using topological operads and arithmetic techniques.
p-curvature in non-commutative Hodge theory and the Kontsevich-Soibelman operad, arXiv (2026).
The Getzler-Gauss-Manin connection and Kontsevich-Soibelman operations on the periodic cyclic homology, arXiv (2026).
On the exponential type conjecture, arXiv (2024). To appear in J. Amer. Math. Soc.
Quantum Steenrod operations and Fukaya categories, arXiv (2024).
On operadic open-closed maps in characteristic p, arXiv (2024).
Earlier undergraduate projects
Special Lagrangians in the Landau-Ginzburg mirror of CP^2, available here (2020). Senior thesis at Harvard College, mentored by Denis Auroux.
Stability conditions and exceptional objects in triangulated categories, Math. Res. Lett, Vol 27, No 4 (2020). Available here. REU project, mentored by Hiro Lee Tanaka.
In Lent term 2026, I served as supervisor for Part II Differential Geometry, Cambridge.
In Spring 2025, I served as teaching assistant for 18.901 Introduction to Topology, MIT.
In Fall 2024, I served as course administrator and recitation leader for 18.06 Linear Algebra, MIT
In Spring 2024, I served as course administrator and led recitation for 18.06 Linear Algebra, MIT.
In Fall 2023, I led recitation for 18.06 Linear Algebra, MIT.
In Spring 2023, I led recitation for 18.06 Linear Algebra, MIT.
In Spring 2022, I served as teaching assistant for 18.906 Algebraic Topology II, MIT.
In Lent and Eastern term 2026, I co-organized a Reading seminar on birational geometry and quantum cohomology with Ailsa Keating and Ivan Smith.
In Spring 2025, I co-organized a Reading seminar on local systems and mapping class groups with Yonghwan Kim and Sasha Petrov.
In Spring 2024, I co-organized a Reading seminar on crystalline cohomology and Gauss-Manin connections with Jae Hee Lee and Yonghwan Kim.
In Spring 2022, I co-organized a Reading seminar on Local to global principles in symplectic topology with Jae Hee Lee.
2027/01 Young Mathematician Forum, National University of Singapore.
2026/11 Scottish Topology Seminar, St. Andrews University.
2026/05 Symplectic New York conference, Rutgers University. "Steenrod operations, operads and Lagrangian submanifolds".
2026/02 Homological Mirror Symmetry conference, University of Miami. "Kontsevich-Soibelman operations on the periodic cyclic homology".
2025/11 Symplectic seminar, University of Bonn. "Singularity and decomposition of the quantum connection".
2025/10 EDGE seminar, University of Edinburgh. "Singularity and decomposition of the quantum connection".
2025/03 Informal symplectic seminar, MIT. "Singularity and decomposition of the quantum connection".
2025/01 Symplectic Zoominar (20 min talk), online (video). "The exponential type conjecture for quantum connection".
2025/01 Winter School on Enumerative Geometry and Mirror symmetry, Caltech. Minicourse "Characteristic p methods in symplectic topology".