3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

Yanki Lekili
PhD: MIT, 2009
Position prior to MSRI membership: none
Position after MSRI membership: junior research fellow at Cambridge University
Mentor: Ko Honda
Yanki received his PhD from MIT in May 2009 under the supervision of Denis Auroux, so
the postdoc position at MSRI was his first experience as a researcher after graduate school.
Overall, he mentioned that had an outstanding research/learning experience at MSRI. While at
MSRI, Yanki worked on several projects, some of which were initiated and completed at MSRI.
As for the latter, he completed two joint papers on open books and contact structures, one of
these with Tolga Etgü and the other with Burak Ozbagci. Both of these papers are published
now (IMRN & MRL). Yanki also completed another preprint with Max Lipyanskiy on quilted
Floer homology. Finally, he made significant progress on his joint paper with Tim Perutz,
concerning an extension of Heegaard Floer invariants to three-manifolds with boundary. This
latter work is still in progress. As for the learning experience, he feels that he has learned
quite a bit from numerous seminar talks and conferences that he attended while at MSRI. In
particular, the seminars organized by Yakov Eliashberg and Paul Seidel were really interesting
and made him realize new research directions that he is planning to pursue in the future. After
his stay at MSRI, Yanki took a position at the Max-Planck Institut in Bonn for the summer
followed by a junior research fellow position at the University of Cambridge for the upcoming
years.
Maksim Maydanskiy
PhD: MIT, 2009
Position prior to MSRI membership: none
Position after MSRI membership: postdoc at Cambridge University followed by NSf postdoc
at Stanford University
Mentor: Yasha Eliashberg, John Etnyre, Paul Seidel
While at MSRI, Maksim worked on two papers on exotic symplectic structures on cotangent
bundles of spheres and and related spaces. One, joint with Paul Seidel, has now appeared in
Topology (M. Maydanskiy and P. Seidel. Lefschetz fibrations and exotic symplectic structures
on cotangent bundles of spheres. J. Topology, 3:157 V180, 2010.). The other is being revised
for Geometry and Topology (available as http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2224v1). These are based
on Maksim’s thesis computations in wrapped Fukaya category. At MSRI he continued thinking
about the wrapped Fukaya category, and its relation to the symplectic homology and other
symplectic invariants (contact homology, SFT...). One of the results of this was an appendix
to Effect of Legendrian Surgery by Frederic Bourgeois, Tobias Ekholm, Yakov Eliashberg
(arXiv:0911.0026v3), that he wrote with Sheel Ganatra on relating the BEE surgery method
for working with symplectic homology of Weinstein manifolds to the Seidel picture for Lefschetz
fibrations.
Mark McLean
PhD: Cambridge University, 2008
Position prior to MSRI membership: postdoc at MIT
Position after MSRI membership: resumes previous position
Mentor: Lenny Ng, Viktor Ginzburg
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