3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

Name: Sikimeti Mau
Year of Ph.D.: 2008
Institution of Ph.D.: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Ph.D. advisor: Christopher Woodward
Institution prior to obtaining MSRI PD fellowship: MSRI
Position at that institution: 1 year Special Program postdoc
Institution where you held your MSRI PD fellowship: Barnard College
Mentor at that institution: Dusa McDuff
Institution (or company) where you are going next year: UC Berkeley
Position: Postdoctoral fellowship
Anticipated length: 3 years Mentor: Denis Auroux
Report.
Mentor meetings: In the Fall semester I had meetings approximately every week with
my mentor, either via Skype or in person. That semester I was also on the job market,
putting together job applications as well as NSF grant applications, and she provided a lot
of valuable feedback on the various statements that I was writing, about the actual
research content as well as editorial comments. During the Spring semester we didn't
manage to meet quite so religiously, mostly due to a lot of scheduled travel, and since I
was in Berkeley I met more often with Denis Auroux, who will be my mentor at UC
Berkeley (my job following this fellowship).
Travel and talks: During the year I was invited to a number of seminars and
conferences. In the Fall I gave talks at Columbia University's geometry seminar the
University of Texas at Austin's geometry seminar. In the Spring I gave a talk at the UC
Berkeley topology seminar. In the Spring semester I traveled to a Low Dimensional
Topology conference in Banff, Canada, an Equivariant Quantum Cohomology workshop
at the Simons Center in Stony Brook, NY, and the Georgia Topology Conference in
Athens, GA. The fellowship provided a generous amount of travel funding, which allowed
me to plan to attend workshops and conferences without having those plans be
contingent on funding. Being able to travel in these early stages of my professional
career has probably been quite influential in developing a professional profile. Over the
summer I have been invited to speak at workshops in France and Germany.
Teaching: In the Fall I did a small amount of teaching at Barnard College. I taught
three weeks' worth of an undergraduate course “Introduction to Higher
Mathematics”, a course for potential math majors about rigorous proofs.
I also taught a three week unit of a general interest course called
“Perspectives in Mathematics”, introducing the notion of conformal maps
and their connections to complex numbers. The class consisted of
undergraduates who for the most part were not math majors, but
interested in learning math that wasn't calculus.
Papers worked on Fall 2010 - Spring 2011:
"Quilted Strips, graph associahedra and A-infinity n-modules" (submitted)
"Quilted Floer A-infinity modules" (in preparation, grew out of a manuscript originally
intended to be "A note on Bimodules and Lagrangian correspondences")
"A-infinity functors for Lagrangian correspondences" (in preparation, joint with C.
Woodward and K. Wehrheim)