3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

• Spring 2008: Representation Theory of finite Groups and Related Topics John Alperin, Michel
Broué, John Carlson, Alexander Kleshchev, Jeremy Rickard, Bama Srinivasan
• Fall 2008: Analysis on Singular Spaces Gilles Carron, Eugenie Hunsicker, Richard Melrose,
Michael Taylor, Jared Wunsch
• Fall 2008: Ergodic Theory and Additive Combinatorics Ben Green, Bryna Kra, Emmanuel
Lesigne, Anthony Quas, Mate Wierdl
• Spring 2009: Algebraic Geometry William Fulton, Joe Harris, Brendan Hassett, János Kollár,
Sándor Kovács, Robert Lazarsfeld, Ravi Vakil
• Fall 2009: Tropical Geometry Eva-Maria Feichtner, Ilia Itenberg, Grigory Mikhalkin, Bernd
Sturmfels
• Fall 2009 and Spring 2010: Symplectic and Contact Geometry and Topology Yakov Eliashberg,
John Etnyre, Eleny-Nicoleta Ionel, Dusa McDuff, Paul Seidel
• Spring 2010: Homology Theories of Knots and Links Mikhail Khovanov, Dusa McDuff, Peter
Ozsváth, Lev Rozansky, Peter Teichner, Dylan Thurston, Zoltan Szabó
Over the 5-year period of the grant, a total of 1205 members were in residence at MSRI for
periods ranging from a month up to 10 months, which means an average of 240 members per
year. The average length of stay was 73 days (approximately 2.4 months). Members were roughly
evenly divided among 5-year cohorts, delineated by their year-from-PhD, with 45% of them having
completed a PhD within the last 10 years of their visits to MSRI. Among the members, 57% were
from US institutions and 47% were US citizen or US permanent residents, which is essentially in
line with the composition of the graduate student population in the US for the last 10 years (about
45% of them have been Americans or Permanent Residents).
Women comprised roughly 19% of the members. While complete information on ethnicity is
not available, two Native Americans, eight African-Americans, and thirty Latinos/Latinas stated
their ethnic backgrounds.
We survey all of the program participants on exit and at intervals thereafter. These surveys
are available upon request; there is no space to include a range of samples here. We will just give
one quote: Alan W. Reid wrote, “As an organizer of the Teichmuller theory and Kleinian groups
program who could not be in residence for the whole semester, I was able to stand back and look
from the outside. My impression is that the program has been a fantastic success. This is in part
because of the timeliness of the program. However, the key components were the well-balanced mix
of young postdocs, senior people and the visitors. Many new collaborations have started, many
old ones have been given impetus, and the feeling I get is of a subject that continues to produce
excellent young people doing first-rate mathematics. The two drawbacks for me were that I couldn’t
come for the whole semester and, perhaps more importantly, I really feel one semester is too short
of a time for such a program.”
Workshops
During the period of this grant, MSRI has hosted around 30 workshops per year, a few of
which are held off-site. We classify them into programmatic (i.e., those related to currently running
programs), non-programmatic, and summer graduate schools. The non-programmatic workshops
are further classified as ‘hot topics’, outreach, educational, interdisciplinary, or other.
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