Amanda received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in May 2026, where she was advised by Thomas Lam. She is interested in algebraic combinatorics and connections to knot theory and is currently working on problems related to invariants of plabic links and cluster algebras.
Colleen Robichaux is interested in algebraic combinatorics. Her work focuses on Schubert calculus and computational complexity. She received her Ph.D. in 2022 from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Alexander Yong. After receiving her degree, she went on to University of California, Los Angeles where she was a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow.
by Sarah Brauner (University of Pennsylvania), Zajj Daugherty (Reed College), Sarah Mason (Wake Forest University), and Anne Schilling (University of California, Davis)
A common story in mathematics is the following: you have a large set of data, and want to find a strategic way to group that data together that makes it simpler to understand. The challenge here is to find a good way to group things that actually distills the information you have, and removes some of the “noise” of the full data set. For example, if your data set measures income by address in a city, it might make sense to group data points by neighborhood, but grouping neighborhoods this way might oversimplify the situation.
I am a Mexican mathematician with a strong interest in discrete geometry, convexity, graph theory, matroids, and combinatorial problems in general. I earned my master’s degree at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and completed a joint Ph.D. at UNAM and the Université de Montpellier. My research focuses on bodies of constant width, Reuleaux polytopes, and the development of new approaches in these areas of mathematics.
Melissa Sherman-Bennett does research in algebraic combinatorics, focusing recently on cluster algebras, total positivity, and connections to particle physics. She received her Ph.D. in 2021 from UC Berkeley, under Lauren Williams. Before coming to Davis, she was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Michigan and MIT.
Melissa Zhang is a low-dimensional topologist who likes to use algebraic, combinatorial, and categorical methods to solve problems. Her favorite topological objects are knots and surfaces smoothly embedded in 3- and 4-dimensional spaces.
She received her Ph.D. from Boston College under the supervision of Eli Grigsby and David Treumann. She was previously a postdoc at the University of Georgia, SLMath/MSRI, and UC Davis (and is now a super-postdoc, as she never left).
Chenchen Zhao completed her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in May 2024, advised by Greta Panova. Her research interests lie in the area of Enumerative and Algebraic Combinatorics. Her dissertation explored the positivity of Kronecker coefficients and the Newton polytope of the Kronecker product of Schur polynomials.
