Marie Curie grant to Adela Zhang

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) supports the opportunity for researchers to do research abroad. The monetary value of each grant is a bit more than 1.6 million DKK.

Read more about the Research Fellowship Programme.

Adela is working as a postdoc at the Copenhagen Centre for Geometry and Topology. She has a B.S. in Mathematics from 2018 and completed her PhD in July 2023. Both degrees are from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), under the supervision of Jeremy Hahn and Haynes Miller. Her thesis was named “Koszul duality and the bar spectral sequence”.

The current research project, mentored by Professor Nathalie Wahl, aims to produce new computations of the mod p homology of labelled configuration spaces of a general manifold with labels in an arbitrary spectrum.

These computations have remained outstanding challenges for decades except in special cases. Recently developed techniques in stable homotopy theory, including spectral Lie algebras and synthetic homotopy theory, have proven to be useful in understanding the algebraic structure of the homology groups of labelled configuration spaces in universal cases, but they are less attuned to the topology of the input manifolds.

Adela plans to attack the problem in this project by incorporating the homotopy-theoretic methods with approaches that consider the geometry of labelled configuration spaces. New computations of these objects will have applications in various fields, including stable homotopy theory, string topology, embedding calculus of manifolds, mathematical physics, and motion planning.