Recent defenses
Thesis defense: Valentina Zapata Castro
Defense date: July 28, 2025
Valentina Zapata Castro will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Monday, July 28. The title is
“Segal Theta_2-monoids as monoidal (infty,1)-categories”.
The defense will be held at Kerchof 111 at 11:00 am.
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Matthew McCarthy
Defense date: July 12, 2025
Matthew McCarthy will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Friday, July 12. The title is
“Connectedness Properties of some Subcomplexes of Twin Buildings and Their Group Theoretic Applications”.
The defense will be held at Kerchof 111 at 3:30 pm.
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Kian Aik Cheong
Defense date: June 30, 2025
Kian Aik Cheong will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Monday, June 30. The title is
“Explicit Kummer theory for some 2-dimensional formal group laws”.
The defense will be held at Kerchof 317 at 10:00 am. The defense will be in hybrid format. For those interested, the Zoom link is: https://virginia.zoom.us/my/valiagazzoomspace
Everyone is invited to attend.
DMP thesis defense: Nikolas Dillery
Defense date: May 5, 2025
Nikolas Dillery will defend the DMP thesis on Monday, May 5. The title is
“Kazhdan’s Property (T): General Results and SL_n(Z)”.
- Date: Monday, May 5
- Time: 3:00 pm
- Place: Kerchof Hall 317
Everyone is cordially invited to attend.
Master thesis defense: Declan Stacy
Defense date: April 30, 2025
Declan Stacy will defend the Master thesis on Wednesday, April 30. The title is
“Stochastic Persistence in Infinite Dimensions”.
- Date: Wednesday, April 30
- Time: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
- Place: Kerchof Hall 111
Everyone is invited to attend.
DMP thesis defense: Liran Li
Defense date: April 30, 2025
Liran Li will defend the Distinguished Major Thesis on Wednesday, April 30 titled
“Automatic groups: a brief introduction”.
- Date: Wednesday, April 30, 2025
- Time: 11:30 am
- Place: New Cabell 027
Everyone is invited to attend.
DMP thesis defense: James Harbour
Defense date: April 29, 2025
James Harbour will defend the DMP thesis on Tuesday, April 29th. The title is
Discrete measured groupoid von Neumann algebras via the Gaussian deformation
- Date: April 29th, 2025
- Time: 11:00 am
- Location: Ker 111
Everyone is invited to attend.
Masters thesis defense: Samir Fridhi
Defense date: April 25, 2025
Samir Fridhi will defend the Master’s thesis on Friday, April 25th. The title is
Tate’s Thesis
- Date: April 25th, 2025
- Time: 5:00 pm
- Location: Kerchof 111
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Aoran Wu
Defense date: April 25, 2025
Aoran Wu will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Friday, April 25. The title is
“Von Neumann orbit equivalence”.
- Date: Friday, April 25
- Time: 2:00 pm
- Place: Kerchof 317
Everyone is cordially invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Mojdeh Tarighat Feller
Defense date: April 25, 2025
Mojdeh Tarighat Feller will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Friday, April 25th. The title is
Products of Closed k-Schur Katalan Functions
- Date: April 25th, 2025
- Time: 1:30 pm
- Location: Zoom
For Zoom link, please reach out to Jennifer Morse .
Everyone is invited to attend.
DMP thesis defense: Catherine Cossaboom
Defense date: April 22, 2025
Catherine Cossaboom will defend the Distinguished Major Thesis on Tuesday, April 22 under the direction of advisor Ken Ono. The title is
“Distribution of Primes in Short Intervals”.
- Date: Tuesday, April 22, 2025
- Time: 9:00 am
- Place: Kerchof 111
Thesis defense: Louisa Liles
Defense date: April 11, 2025
Louisa Liles will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Friday, April 11th, at 9:30 am in New Cabell Hall, Room 323.
Quantum invariants and their connections with Thompson’s groups F and T
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Miika Tuominen
Defense date: March 24, 2025
Miika Tuominen will defend the thesis on Monday, March 24. The title is
“Completions and DK-equivalences of Θn-spaces”.
- Date: Monday, March 24, 2025
- Time: 1:00 pm - 3:30 pm
- Place: Ridley Hall 179
Thesis defense: Wojciech Tralle
Defense date: March 19, 2025
Wojciech Tralle will defend the thesis on Wednesday, March 19. The title is
“Almost strong approximation in reductive groups”.
- Date: Wednesday, March 19, 2025
- Time: 3:30 pm
- Place: Kerchof 111
- Committee: M. Ershov, V. Gazaki, I. Klich, A. Rapinchuk
Everyone is invited to attend.
DMP thesis defense: Declan Stacy
Defense date: April 30, 2024
Declan Stacy will defend the DMP thesis on Monday, April 30. The title is
“Stochastic extinction, An average Lyapunov function approach”.
- Date: Monday, April 30
- Time: 1:00 pm EST
- Place: Kerchof 111
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Yuan Zhang
Defense date: April 24, 2023
Yuan Zhang will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Wednesday, April 24. The title is
“Root group data (RGD) systems of affine type for significant subgroups of isotropic reductive groups over \(k[t,1/t]\)”.
The defense will be held at Kerchof 111 at 3:00 pm.
Yuan and I hope that many of you will be able to attend.
Master thesis defense: Mason Barnes
Defense date: April 22, 2024
Mason Barnes will be defending the Master thesis on Monday, April 22. The title is
“Kashaev Conjecture Solved for the Five Punctured Spheres”.
- Date: Monday, April 22
- Time: 10:00 am
- Location: Kerchof 111
Mason will demonstrate his solution to the Kashaev conjecture for type-preserving representations of the five punctured sphere in PSL(2,R).
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Tanner Carawan
Defense date: April 19, 2023
Tanner Carawan will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Friday, April 19. The title is
“2-Segal maps associated to a category with cofibrations”.
The defense will be held at Kerchof 317 at 3:00 pm.
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Donnelly Phillips
Defense date: April 15, 2023
Donnelly Phillips will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Monday, April 15. The title is
“The Hypoelliptic Heat Kernel on Infinite-Dimensional Lie Groups: Heisenberg-Like Quasi-Invariance and the Taylor Isomorphism”.
The defense will be held at Kerchof 128 at 12:00 pm.
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Shunyu Wan
Defense date: April 9, 2023
Shunyu Wan will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Tuesday, April 9. The title is
“Naturality of the Legendrian LOSS invariant under positive contact surgery”.
The defense will be held at Kerchof Hall 111 at 3:15 pm.
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Alec Traaseth
Defense date: April 8, 2023
Alec Traaseth will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Monday, April 8. The title is
“Combination Theorems for Convergence Groups”.
The defense will be held at Kerchof 111 at 10:00 am.
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Hasan Saad
Defense date: March 25, 2024
Hasan Saad will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Monday, March 25. The title is
“On the Distributions of Point Counts on Hypergeometric Varieties”.
The defense will be held at Kerchof Hall 111 from 1:00 - 2:00 pm.
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Yaolong Shen
Defense date: April 1, 2024
Yaolong Shen will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Monday, April 1. The title is
“Schur dualities arising from quantum symmetric pairs”.
The defense will be held at Kerchof Hall 111 from 1:30 - 3:00 pm.
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Eleanor Mcspirit
Defense date: April 2, 2024
Eleanor Mcspirit will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Tuesday, April 2. The title is
“Insights from Number Theory: From Arithmetic Geometry to Quantum Topology”.
The defense will be held at Kerchof Hall 111 from 9:00 - 11:00 am.
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Jiajun Yan
Defense date: July 14, 2023
Jiajun Yan will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Friday, July 14. The title is
“A new gauge-theoretic construction of 4-dimensional hyper-Kähler ALE spaces”.
The defense will be held virtually at the following link:
https://virginia.zoom.us/j/97021946286?pwd=UWZoTXBmalFmYklWdzM5N0dIZGZwUT09
- Meeting ID: 970 2194 6286
- Passcode: 908710
- Date: Friday, July 14
- Time: 10:00 am EST
Everyone is invited to attend.
Thesis defense: Nhan Nguyen
Defense date: May 17, 2023
Nhan Nguyen will defend the Ph.D. thesis on Wednesday, May 17. The title is
“Estimates for correlation functions of real roots for random polynomials and applications”.
- Date: Wednesday, May 17.
- Time: 1:30 pm EST
- Place: Clark Hall 101
Everyone is invited to attend.
Masters thesis defense: David Winters
Defense date: May 4, 2023
David Winters will defend the Masters thesis on Thursday, May 4. The title is
“4-dimensional 2-handlebodies and topological invariants”.
- Date: Thursday, May 4
- Time: 1:00 pm EST
- Place: New Cabell Hall 044
Everyone is invited to attend!
DMP thesis defense: Mason Barnes
Defense date: May 1, 2023
Mason Barnes will defend the DMP thesis on Monday, May 1. The title is
“PSL(2,R)-character variety of the four-punctured sphere and its connected components”.
- Date: Monday, May 1
- Time: 12:00 pm EST
- Place: New Cabell Hall 032
Everyone is invited to attend. If you would like to join via Zoom, let Sara Maloni know.
DMP thesis defense: Zachary Carlini
Defense date: May 1, 2023
Zachary Carlini will defend the DMP thesis on Monday, May 1. The title is
“Serre relations for i-quantum groups”.
- Date: Monday, May 1
- Time: 1:00 pm EST
- Place: New Cabell Hall 064
Everyone is invited to attend.