3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

Lekili, Yanki
Krasner, Daniel
Lobb, Andrew
Lekili received his Ph.D. from MIT in May 2009 under the supervision of
Denis Auroux. His dissertation was titled “Broken Lefchetz fibrations,
Lagrangian matching invariants and Oxvath-Szabo invariants.” The
postdoc position that he held at MSRI was his first experience as a
researcher after graduate school. Overall, he had an outstanding
research/learning experience at MSRI. While at MSRI, he 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 paper is with Tolga Etgu and the other is with
Burak Ozbagci. Both of these papers are now published in IMRN & MRL.
Healso completed another preprint with Max Lipyanskiy on quilted Floer
homology. Finally, he made significant progress on his joint paper with
Tim Perutz, which concerns an extension of Heegaard Floer invariants to
three-manifolds with boundary. This latter work is still in progress. As for
the learning experience, he felt that he has learned quite a bit from the
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 pointed toward new research directions he plans
to pursue in the future. After his stay at MSRI, he accepted on a position at
The Max-Planck Institut in Bonn for the summer period. In the coming
years, Lekili will be a junior research fellow at the University of
Cambridge.
Daniel received his Ph.D degree from Columbia University in 2009 under
the supervision of Mikhail Khovanov. His dissertation was titled
“Computations and structures in sl(n)-link homology”. During his stay at
MSRI, Daniel worked closely with his mentor, Thomas Mark. After his
stay at MSRI, Daniel took on the Assistant Adjunct Professor position at
UCLA.
Andrew received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 2007 under
the supervision of Peter Benedict Kronheimer. His dissertation was titled
“A Slice Genus Lower-Bound from SL(n) Khovanov-Rozansky
Homology”. During his stay at MSRI, Andrew worked closely with his
mentor, Matt Hedden. After his stay at MSRI, Andrew took on a
postdoctoral position at SUNY Stony Brook.
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