I am a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne working in algebraic topology. I have difficulty stating quickly my research interests, but I usually say that I live in the intersection of operad theory, homotopy theory, and higher category theory. These days, I like to focus on applications of operads to low dimensional topology and geometry. My daily arXiv briefings include algebraic topology, category theory, and quantum algebra.

I finished my PhD in 2010 at the University of Illinois-Chicago under the supervision of Brooke Shipley. I was a postdoc under J.F. (Rick) Jardine and Benoit Fresse, and worked at UCLA, before coming to Melbourne in July 2015.

I organise the weekly Topology Seminar with Diarmuid Crowley. The seminar meets on Mondays and is currently running via Zoom. Please contact me if you have questions or suggested speakers. 

I have/had several students who are now loose upon the world:

• Olivia Borghi is working on her PhD, thinking about cactus groups, cyclic operads and coboundary categories.
• Patrick Elliott is working on his PhD, joint supervised with Christian Haesemeyer. Patrick is thinking about the Moasic operad and new models for infinity cyclic operads.
• Tamara Hogan finished her Masters on planar algebras, knot invariants and the Kashiwara-Vergne conjecture. She is currently working on PhD jointly supervised by myself and Zsuzsanna Dancso at the University of Sydney.
• Michelle Strumilla has finished her PhD on quasi-modular operads.
• Ethan Armitage finished his Masters at Melbourne in 2018, Profinite Completion of Modular Operads and an Infinity Cyclic Operad of Surfaces. Ethan won the Wilson Prize for his thesis.
• Musashi Koyama finished his Masters at Melbourne in 2017, Applications of Cyclic Wiring Diagrams, and went on to a PhD at The Ohio State University. Musashi won the Nanson Prize for his thesis.
• Cole Hugelmeyer finished his Masters/Honors at UCLA in 2015 and is now working on his PhD at Princeton.

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