Laura Schaposnik

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 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. 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 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.

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;