Graduate Students in Chronological Order

The current extended Family April 2008

  • Will Traves (1998, University of Toronto)
    Thesis: Differential Operators and Nakai's Conjecture and other old stuff
    Traves first job was at as an NSERC post-doc at Berkeley. He is now full Professor at the US Naval Academy.

  • Joel Rosenberg (1999, University of Michigan)
    Thesis: "Moduli of Cubic Surfaces" co-advised by Joe Harris.
    Rosenberg is currently a mathematical researcher at the Institute for Defense Analysis Center for Communications Research (IDA-CCR).

  • Uriel Scott (2000, University of Michigan)
    Thesis: Sparse Systems of Parameters for Projective Varieties
    After finishing his degree, Scott worked as a trader for the famous proprietary trading firm Susquehanna, then moved on to a 'quant' position at Mirant Atlanta (formally Southern Energy), an energy trading firm. Since July 2006, he's been doing math research with Constellation Commodities Group in Baltimore.

  • Sara Faridi (2000, University of Michigan)
    Thesis: Closure Operations on Ideals.
    Faridi was an Assistant Professor at George Washington University, then at the University of Ottawa, before solving the two-body problem and settling down at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she recently got promoted to tenure.

  • Manuel Blickle (2001, University of Michigan)
    Thesis: The intersection homology D-module in finite characteristic.
    Blickle's first job was a post-doctoral position at the University of Essen, working in Esnault and Viehweg's algebraic geometry group. He now hold's Germany's very prestigious Heisenberg Fellowship, and recently accepted a professorship at Mainz.
    Here we are at a conference for my own advisor Mel Hochster 's 65-th birthday, August 2008.

  • Amanda Johnson (2003, University of Michigan).
    Thesis: Multiplier ideals of determinantal ideals.
    Amanda has a mathematical research position at the National Security Agency.

  • Cornelia Yuen (2006, University of Michigan)
    Thesis: Jet Schemes and Wedge Schemes of Monomial and Determinantal Varieties.
    Cornelia spent a year as a post-doc at the University of Kentucky, and is now a tenure track Assistant Professor at SUNY Potsdam.     Here we are at Mel's conference and then later with some academic siblings at a party at my house for Mel's birthday.

  • Yogesh More (2008, University of Michigan)
    PhD Thesis: Arc Valuations on Smooth Varieties.
    Yogesh is a post-doc at the University of Missouri, working with Dan Edinin.
    Here we are in my kitchen at Yogesh's graduation party, and at the milkshake party with Andrey, Tapio and Helena.

  • Kevin Tucker (expected 2010)
    is studying techniques for computing multiplier ideals and jumping numbers of ideal sheaves on mildly singular varieties. He is already an expert on surfaces, where he has completely described the jumping numbers in terms of the combinatorics and simple intersection theory of the exceptional divisors, including an algorithm to compute all jumping numbers, and also shown that every integrally closed ideal on log terminal surface is a multiplier ideal. Lately, he's been learning prime characteristic techniques (F-splitting, etc) and thinking about higher dimensional birational geometry. With Karl Schweded, he found a formula for the number of log canonical centers of a pair, among other things. We're also talking about higher dimensional issues in the computation of multiplier ideals. Check out     some of his work or our picture on Halloween on my front porch.

  • Daniel Hernandez (expected 2011) has been computing F-thresholds of hypersurfaces, and recently found a very nice formula for the F-threshold for many types of hypersurfaces, including Fermat-type and binomial hypersurfaces, as a function of the characteristic. He uses quite a bit of clever and tricky elementary number theory. He is working on the generalization to an arbitrary hypersurface. Here's Daniel on Halloween in front of my house with his girlfriend and my academic sister Emily Witt.

  • Chelsea Walton (expected 2011) is really my "foster student", having worked mostly with Toby Stafford on non-commutative projective algebraic geometry. She recently completed a beautiful classication of the degenerate Sklyanin algebras. She splits her time between Michigan and Manchester England. I think we make a pretty cool pair of witches.

  • Michael Von Korff is just starting out, reading Hartshorne.

    I am also working closely right now with Andrey Mishchenko (circle packing) and with Brian Wyman (extremal graph theory), though officially I believe I am not either one's PhD advisor at the moment.