Graduate Students in Chronological Order

The (no longer so) current extended Family April 2008

  • Will Traves (1998, University of Toronto)
    PhD Thesis: Differential Operators and Nakai's Conjecture
    Professor and Math Department Chair, US Naval Academy, Annapolis. Traves first job was at as an NSERC post-doc at Berkeley.
    Here we are with my more recent students Robert Walker and Sarah Mayes-Tang at the MAA MathFest in DC.

  • Joel Rosenberg (1999, University of Michigan)
    PhD Thesis: Geometry of 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)
    PhD Thesis: Sparse Systems of Parameters for Projective Varieties
    Uriel Scott is a founder of Digital Mint, a financial company founded in 2014 providing Bitcoin ATMs and teller locations. 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), then Constellation Commodities in Baltimore, and other finance research positions throughout the country.

  • Sara Faridi (2000, University of Michigan)
    PhD Thesis: Closure Operations on Ideals.
    Sara Faridi is now a Professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, after being an Assistant Professor at George Washington University and at the University of Ottawa.

  • Manuel Blickle (2001, University of Michigan)
    PhD 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 held Germany's very prestigious Heisenberg Fellowship, and is now a professor at Mainz.
    Here we are at a conference for my own advisor Mel Hochster 's 65-th birthday, August 2008, and in January 2011 on a hike at Luminy, Marseilles France.

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

  • Cornelia Yuen (2006, University of Michigan)
    PhD Thesis: Jet Schemes and Truncated Wedge schemes.
    Cornelia is a Professor at SUNY Potsdam, after a post-doc at the University of Kentucky. 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 Professor at the college of Old Westbury, SUNY, after first completing a post-doc at the University of Missouri.
    Here we are in my kitchen at Yogesh's graduation party, and at the milkshake party with Andrey, Tapio and Helena.

  • Kevin Tucker (2010, University of Michigan)
    PhD Thesis: Jumping Numbers and Multiplier Ideals on Algebraic Surfaces, the winner of the SUMNER MEYERS PRIZE for our department's best 2010 thesis.
    Kevin is a Professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, after a post-doc at Princeton and and NSF fellowship at Utah, working with my former post-doc Karl Schwede.
    Halloween 2008     on my front porch.

  • Daniel Hernandez (2011, University of Michigan)
    PhD thesis: F-purity of hypersurfaces
    Associate Professor at the University of Kansas, after an NSF post-doc at UTAH and a Dunham Jackson Assistant Professor at University of Minnesota.
    Here's Daniel on Halloween in front of my house with wife and my academic sister Emily Witt, a powerful mathematician herself.

  • Chelsea Walton (2011, U Michigan)
    PhD Thesis: On Degenerations and Deformations of Sklyanin Algebras, co-advised by Toby Stafford.
    Chelsea is an Associate Professor of Rice since she moved in 2020 from UIUC, and before that after serving as the Selma Lee Bloch Brown Assistant professor at Temple University. Before that she was an NSF post-doc at UW Seattle and a Moore Instructor at MIT. She also won our department's Cornwell Prize in 2011 for the most promising mathematics student, and just recently the Andre Lichnerowicz Prize in Poisson geometry, 2019.
    I think we make a pretty cool pair of witches.

  • Michael Von Korff (2012, U Michigan)
    PhD Thesis: The F-signature and Frobenius Splitting of Toric Varieties.
    Michael worked for several years an education start-up called Reasoning Mind based in Houston but recently relocated to a Boston-based ed-tech job at Curriculum Associates. Here's Michael and my daughter Helena on a hike with us in Finland.

  • Sarah Mayes (2013, U Michigan)
    PhD Thesis: The Asymptotic Behavior of Generic intital systems.
    Sarah is now an professor of practice at Toronto, having recently moved there from Quest University in Canada.
    Here we are with Michael Von Korff at his defense party.

  • Brooke Ullery, (2015 UMichigan)
    PhD Thesis: Tautological vector bundles on the Hilbert scheme of points and the normality of secant varieties , co-advised by Rob Lazarsfeld.
    Brooke started as an Assistant Professor at Emory University in 2020 after a Pierce Instructorship at Harvard. At Brooke's Thesis Defense Party

  • Balin Fleming (2015 UMichigan).
    PhD Thesis: Arc schemes in Logarithmic Algebraic Geometry. Balin is a post-doc with Kalle Karu at the University of British Columbia. Christmas 2014

  • Xiaolei Zhao, (2015 U Michigan)
    PhD Thesis: Topological Abel-Jacobi Mapping and Jacobi Inversion, co-advised by Herb Clemens.
    Xiaolei has also studied The MMP for deformations of Hilbert schemes of points on the projective plane. Xioalei is now an Associate Professor at UC Santa Barbara, after a Zelevinsky Research Instructorship at Northeastern University, working with Emanuele Macrì. Xiaolei and me at his thesis defense with his wife Chen.

  • Gilad Pagi (2018 U Michigan)
    Enhanced Algorithms For F-Pure Threshold
    currently employed at Google. Here we are at Gilad's PhD graduation ceremony.

  • Rankeya Datta (2018 U Michigan)
    A Tale of Valuation Rings in Prime Characteristic.
    Rankeya will be starting an Assistant Professorship at the University of Missouri, after post-docs at MSU (2021-2022) and the University of Illinois, Chicago (2018-2021). Celebrating!

  • Robert Walker (2019 U Michigan)
    PhD Thesis: Uniform Symbolic Topologies in Non-Regular Rings.
    Robert was a NSF/Van Vleck Visiting Professor at University of Wisconsin, working with Dan Erman. He has since moved to Seattle as a visiting scholar at Google.
    Here's me and Robert at the MAA MathFest in DC.

  • Eamon Quinlan (2021 University of Michigan)
    PhD Thesis: Bernstein-Sato Polynomials in Prime Characteristic.
    Eamon is an NSF post-doctoral fellow at the University of Utah working with Karl Schwede and Anurag Singh.

  • Alapan Mukhopadhyay is working on various generalizations of Hilbert-Kunz multiplicities. We also wrote a paper together on reducedness of formally unramified algebras. He is expected to defend his thesis in 2023.

  • Swaraj Pande is has studied multiplicities of jumping numbers for multiplier ideals, and recently moved on to thinking about continuity of the F-signature function on the ample cone of a globally F-regular variety. Swaraj will defend his thesis in 2023.

  • Anna Brosowsky is studying the "Cartier Core" map for Frobenius split Cartier subalgebras of the full Cartier Algebra. This generalizizes F-pure centers/uniformly F-compatible ideals.

  • Andres Martinez Servellon is working on perivations and other exotic things in mixed characteristic.

  • Olivia Strahan just started working with me and will likely do something on Hochster and Huneke's notion of quasi-length.

  • Havi Ellers just passed her prelim in commutative algebra.

  • I was also a surrogate advisor for Andrey Mishchenko, circle packer extraordinaire, who defended summer 2012 and worked for Formlabs, a 3D printing company, brielfy at Google, then Instabase, and now at Open AI. Here's me and my Buddy when he was but a youngster, back in 2008.