Post-docs: Former and Current

Jesse Kass (2009 PhD Harvard University).
Jesse, who wrote his PhD with Joe Harris, is an RTG post-doc who works on extending families of Jacobians. I am looking forward to learning a lot from him.

Karl Schwede (2006 PhD University of Washington),
recently accepted a tenure track position at PENN STATE. He was a Michigan RTG/NSF post-doc 2006-2010. At Michian, we worked on two different projects. Together with Sandor Kovacs, we've proved a simple new characterization of DuBois singularities in the Cohen-Macaulay case, which has nice applications to a conjecture of Kollar and to Kodaira vanishing for log canonical varieties. Karl and I also figured out a nice story about globally F-regular varieties and their relationship to Log Fano varieties. Karl is also collaborating with my PhD student Kevin Tucker, trying to understand how the test ideal behaves under finite maps. Karl has done deep work in several directions; my personal favorite is his work on F-adjunction and centers of F-purity, which brings to commutative algebra some powerful ideas from birational geometry. Check out his papers on the arvix


Howard Thompson (2002 PhD UC Berkeley)
is currently an assistant professor at University of Michigan, Flint. He was a Michigan post-doc 2002-2006 (his final year on our RTG grant). With Howard, we worked out formulas for multiplier ideals of ideals defining nice subschemes of a smooth scheme, including any scheme defined by binomials (or more generally, any ideal admitting a "factorizing resolution" obtained by blowing up a monomial ideal). We also are studying  which exceptional divisors in the resolution of a  curve on a smooth surface are irrelevent from the point of view of computing jumping numbers, a question inspired by Wim Veys.

See also his bio on Mathematicians of the African Diaspora.


Russell Goward (2001 PhD University of Missouri)
Russell and I worked out the reduced scheme structure of the jet schemes of monomial schemes in a preprint called "Jet schemes of monomial ideals." (see preprint list). See also his bio on Mathematicians of the African Diaspora.


Ana Bravo (1998 PhD Madrid), currently a professor of mathematics at the Autonoma in Madrid, Spain.
With Ana, we worked on two topics:
the behavior of the test ideal under smooth and etale maps (see preprint list),
and also on multiplier ideals for singular varieties (in progess). 




There are many other post-docs at the University of Michigan in the algebra and algebraic geometry groups with whom I have had "unofficial" working relationships.