This also meant that, like many students, I started the PhD without a precise research specialisation in mind, and finding a PhD supervisor was one of the tasks of my first year. In the US model, at least in mathematics, it’s normal not to do a separate master’s degree before the PhD. While there I took part in three undergraduate summer research projects funded by NSERC’s USRA scheme: my thanks to the Department of Mathematics and Statistics for arranging these! These were wide-ranging exploratory projects they led to my first publications, spanning elementary number theory, integer partitions, graph theory, and combinatorial games, and whetted my taste for research.Īfter the BSc I applied to PhD programmes in the US, and chose UC Berkeley largely based on advice from Calgary faculty. I received my BSc from the University of Calgary, my home town, in pure mathematics and computer science. How did you get to this job (education etc.)? And there’s all the other activity of university research life: refereeing and editing for journals, giving research talks, etc.
That means leading our PhD student recruitment and admissions efforts, and ensuring that our PhD students have appropriate training and research environment (and, inevitably, dealing with some bureaucracy). My current role is director of the PhD programme. The most rewarding part of the job is supervising PhD students I’ve had two, give or take, at any given time.Īcademic service roles within my department rotate every few years. Teaching is, honestly, fun-I’m a bit of a ham in the lecture theatre and the students frequently comment on my enthusiasm. Matroidscapture the way that the answers to “which collections of things are independent?” have very similar structure even when “independent” has different meanings: for example it could be linear independence in a set of vectors, or the property of having no cycles among a set of edges in a network.īeyond research, I teach undergraduate modules, most recently an introduction to abstract algebra, and occasionally graduate courses based on my research. By turning algebraic varieties into tropical ones, we transform the original complexity of their geometry into discrete complexity, which we hope turns out easier to understand. Tropical varieties are polyhedral “shadows” of algebraic varieties, the solution sets of systems of polynomial equations. Here are a couple of my favourite objects to study. I do research in algebraic combinatorics with a geometric flavour. Twitter or other social media handle: n/a
Scientific Discipline/Field: Algebra and combinatorics
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