3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

4.3 Program Associates
Program Associates benefit greatly from the opportunity to interact with leaders of a field and
postdoctoral fellows, gaining intense exposure to current ideas and trends in their area of
specialization. While MSRI does not have the financial resources to fund the Program
Associates, they are closely supervised and essentially benefit from all members‟ privileges.
They are provided with an access card to the building which allows them to use the premises at
any time. They receive a bus pass, and a library and sports facilities access pass. There were 28
graduate students who resided at MSRI for an extended period of time during the academic year
2009-10. Of those students, 29% were female. See the table in section 4.7 for a detailed
description of the demographic data.
The year-long program in Symplectic and Contact Geometry and Topology and the Fall semester
program in Tropical Geometry hosted the majority of the program associates.
In the Symplectic and Contact Geometry and Topology Program, a large group of UC Berkeley
graduate students participated in the program alongside the program associates. Many graduate
students made significant progress in their research. For example:
- Jennifer Hom completed a paper titled “A note on cabling and L-space surgeries”
and worked on a preliminary draft of another paper.
- Yuan Huang completed his work on a convex surface theory proof of Elisahberg‟s
well-known theorem on this subject.
In the Tropical Geometry Program, weekly graduate student seminars were organized by Alex
Fink and Franziska Schroter. In addition, a more informal „What-Is‟ seminar was organized as a
forum for program associates and postdocs to interact and to learn about relevant mathematical
concepts. Here are a few research projects undertaken by program associates in Tropical
Geometry:
- Angelica Cueto published an article on the geometry of the restricted Boltzmann
machine. This is her joint work with Jason Morton and Bernd Sturmfels.
- Alex Fink was invited to speak at the research workshop in October where he
presented his project on tropical cycles and Chow polytopes.
- Benjamin Iriarte wrote a paper on Phylogenetic trees and the tropical
Grassmannian. (One of the main problems in evolutionary biology is that of
reconstructing a phylogenetic tree from a DNA sequence alignment of n species.
This process is considerably simplified by the distance-based approach.)
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