Seminar/workshop news

• I co-organize the weekly seminar for the Emmy Noether Institute with Mina Teicher (and previously with Fei Yei).
• I co-organized the weekly graduate student seminar for the Emmy Noether Institute with Mina Teicher, Anna Zarkh and Fei Yei in Spring 2012.
• I co-organized the first ever Baton Rouge Young Topologists Research Retreat with Kate Kearney at LSU in January 2012.
• I've also organized a working group on the Analogy between Knots and Primes that inspired one of my current research projects.

Publication news -- see Research for complete list (or the arXiv)

• My paper (7) Links arising from braid monodromy factorizations (joint with Meirav Amram Topol and Mina Teicher) is on the arXiv.
• My note (6) A correspondence between complexes and knots is on the arXiv. This resulted from my participation in a summer school on Discrete Morse Theory and Commutative Algebra at the Institut Mittag-Leffler.
• My paper (5) Kauffman’s clock lattice as a graph of perfect matchings: a formula for its height (joint with Mina Teicher) is on the arXiv.
• My article "A Knot Game with _not KNerds" with Allison Henrich on undergraduate research appears in the November 2012 issue of Math Horizons.
• My paper (4) A reduced set of moves on one-vertex ribbon graphs coming from links (joint with Susan Abernathy, Cody Armond, Oliver Dasbach, Hannah Mannuel, Chris Penn, Heather M. Russell, Neal Stoltzfus) has been accepted by Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society
• My paper (3) A twisted dimer model for knots (joint with Oliver Dasbach and Heather M. Russell) will appear in Fundamenta Mathematicae.
  
• My paper (2) A determinant formula for the Jones polynomial of pretzel knots was published in the Journal of Knot Theory and its Ramifications vol. 21, no. 6 (2012) 1250062.
• The Pacific Coast Undergraduate Mathematics Conference featured my two Math Horizons articles on Math Clubs.
  
• My dissertation was part of the required reading for the grad students in the LSU topology group's Vertically Integrated Research course for Fall 2011.

Research Interests include

• Knot polynomials, knot homology theories, and other knot invariants
• Dimers or perfect matchings on graphs, and other topics in matroid theory, graph theory, and enumerative combinatorics
• Arrangements of hyperplanes and other configurations, as well as other topics in oriented matroid theory
• The analogy between knots embedded in three-manifolds and prime ideals in number fields
• Low-dimensional as well as combinatorial topology