3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

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In conclusion, my postdoc at MSRI has been very profitable for me: it enlarged my mathematical
panorama, I could finish ongoing works, start new ones, and make new contacts. I’m
looking forward to a next stay at MSRI!”
Eric Katz
PhD: Stanford, 2004
“A Formalism for Relative Gromov-Witten Invariants”
Previous affiliations: Duke University, Assistant Research Professor;
U Texas Austin, Lecturer/RTG Postdoc
Professional Placement: NSF Institute Postdoc, MSRI
Mentor at MSRI: Dmitry Feichtner-Kozlov
Eric Katz finished an article joint with Sam Payne on realization spaces for tropical fans (see
above: Research Developments, 11). He has a draft paper completed with Alan Stapledon on
connections between tropical geometry and limiting mixed Hodge structures of degenerations of
complex varieties. Moreover, he started projects with Christian Haase, Gregg Musiker and Alan
Stapledon on chip-firing on simplicial complexes, and with Tristram Bogart on local obstructions
to lifting tropical curves.
Lucia Lopez de Medrano
PhD: Université de Paris VI, 2007
“Courbure totale des hypersurfaces algebriques reelles et patchwork”
Previous affiliations: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Postdoc.
Professional Placement: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Postdoc.
Mentor at MSRI: Bernd Sturmfels
“I mainly worked on the joint project with Erwan Brugallé about Tropical inflection points.
This project started in June when Erwan visited me in Mexico. In the MSRI, we finished all
the cases. I wrote a first version of the paper in the MSRI. I presented this work in the first
workshop and in the postdoc seminar.
I also finished the corrections of two papers: ”Puiseux power series solutions for systems
equations” (joint work with Fuensanta Aroca and Giovanna Illardi) and ”Recursive formulas
for Welschinger invariants of the projective plane” (joint work with Aubin Arroyo and Erwan
Brugallé).
I discused with Mikael Passare about a future project.
In the MSRI, I met a lot of people working in Tropical Geometry and I learned about their
present work and the techniques they use. I’m sure this will be very usefull for futures projects
and collaborations. I already invited some of them to visited me in Mexico to collaborate with
our Tropical team.
My son Mahigan was born on December 11th, 2009.”
Christoffer Manon
PhD: University of Maryland, 2009
“Presentations of Semigroup Algebras of Weighted Trees”
Previous affiliations: n/a
Professional Placement: UC Berkeley, NSF postdoc
Mentor at MSRI: David Eisenbud
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