Laura Schaposnik

Photo by Max Telford, at All Souls’ Visiting Fellows Farewell night, June 2023.

After receiving my degree of Licenciada en Matemáticas from the University of La Plata (here is a travel guide to La Plata I wrote), I obtained my DPhil from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Nigel Hitchin. I was then a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Heidelberg in Anna Wiennhard’s group, and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in Steve Bradlow’s group. I moved to Chicago to take up a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2015, where I am a Professor in Mathematics. I live with my Family in downtown Chicago.

My research focuses on the study of geometric properties of different spaces:

Moduli spaces of decorated Bundles: The geometry and topology of the moduli spaces of decorated bundles, especially Higgs bundles and Hitchin systems, and geometric structures they parametrize. Research on the moduli spaces of Higgs bundles has yielded connections between fundamental areas of mathematics and theoretical physics, blending ideas from algebraic and differential geometry, Lie theory, representation theory, and string theory.

Geometric questions within different areas of science In particular, my current projects lie within the two directions: related to virus and society , with an overall aim of building novel techniques that can be used in a vast array of areas, related to: Geometric insights, in particular symmetries and patterns; Repurposing stock market indicators for time series data in social and natural sciences. Graph and network theoretic approaches.

A driving force behind my research is the idea that when a system is complex, making a small change can cause it to react in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. But within a simple system, the effects of small changes tend to be clearer. This is one of the reasons why I often focus on seeking simplicity within the initial projects, subsequently building to more complicated applications. My work has appeared in the Journal of Differential Geometry, Transactions of the AMS, Communications in Mathematical Physics, Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, Proceedings of the Royal Society A, among other journals.

During the Fall 2022 I was a visiting professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of California, Berkeley, and a Research Professor at MSRI, Berkeley, USA. During the Spring 2023 I am a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford , and a visiting member of the Mathematical Institute, at the University of Oxford. During the summer 2023 I’ll be in Paris, partly as a visiting member of the Institut Henri Poincaré.

I am on the editorial board of Geometriae Dedicata, and together with Lara B. Anderson we edited a special volume of SIGMA on Hitchin systems.

My research at UIC has been supported by the following: [NSF FRG Award DMS- 2152107](PI), 2022-2025; Simons Fellowship (PI), 2022-2023; NSF CAREER Award DMS 1749013 (PI), 2018-2023; NSF Award DMS 1749013 (PI), 2019;
Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (PI), 2017-2019; NSF Award DMS 1611835 (PI), 2015-2019;