I’m a Professor and Chair of Mathematics at Louisiana State University. Before arriving at LSU, I was a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University and a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania. I received my doctorate back in 2009 under the supervision of John Etnyre and Herman Gluck.

Research:
My research centers on questions in contact geometry, low-dimensional topology, knot theory and Riemannian geometry. My work addresses classification and structure problems for contact 3-manifolds as well as the Legendrian and transverse knots they contain. I am also interested in questions lying in the intersection between classical knot theory and Riemannian geometry. I study geometric invariants in magnetohydrodynamics and, specifically, higher-order analogues of helicity invariants of vector fields.

Teaching: I am not teaching this semester.

Virtual Low-Dimensional Topology: Check out the latest virtual seminars and other activities in low-dimensional topology here.

My Postdoctoral Mentees:
– Tristan Wells Filbert
– Angela Wu
• Currently an Assistant Professor at the Bucknell University
– C.-M. Mike Wong
• Currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa

My Current Graduate Students:
– Adithyan Pandikkadan
– Nilangshu Bhattacharyya

My Past Graduate Students
– Megan Fairchild, Ph.D. Louisiana State University, 2025
• Thesis: Non-Orientable Surfaces Bounded by Knots
• Currently the Associate Director of Faculty Outreach for Disability Services at the University of Utah

– Justin Murray, Ph.D. Louisiana State University, 2024
• Thesis: The Homotopy Cardinality of the Representation Category
• Currently an Assistant Teaching Professor at Ball State University

– Sudipta Ghosh, Ph.D. Louisiana State University, 2022.
(co-advisor with Scott Baldridge)
• Thesis: Connected Sums and Directed Systems in Knot Floer Homologies
• Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Notre Dame

– Robert Quarles, Ph.D. Louisiana State University, 2022.
(co-advisor with Oliver Dasbach)
• Thesis: A New Perspective on a Polynomial Time Knot Polynomial
• Currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Berry College

– Ryan Leigon, Ph.D. Louisiana State University, 2021.
(co-advisor with Scott Baldridge)
• Thesis: An Equivalence Between Contact Gluing Maps in Sutured Floer Homology: A
Conjecture of Zarev

– Rima Chatterjee, Ph.D. Louisiana State University, 2021.
• Thesis: Knots and links in overtwisted contact manifolds
• Currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at The Ohio State University

– Federico Salmoiraghi, Ph.D. Louisiana State University, 2019.
• Thesis: Equivalence of contact gluing maps in sutured Floer homology
• Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Queens University

– Jose Ceniceros, Ph.D. Louisiana State University, 2017.
• Thesis: Legendrian and Transverse Invariants Coming from Knot Floer Homology
• Currently an Associate Professor at Hamilton College