Faculty Spotlight: Chris Rogers

Chris Rogers, PhD joined the Mathematics Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette as an Assistant Professor in August 2015. Chris Rogers is a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in pure mathematics in 2011 from the University of California, Riverside. His thesis was supervised by John Baez.

From 2011 to 2014, Dr. Rogers was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Göttingen in Germany. He spent this past year as a researcher in the Institute for Mathematics and Informatics at the University of Greifswald in Germany, where he also taught graduate and undergraduate courses in topology.

Dr. Rogers' research explores the interface between algebraic topology, geometry, and mathematical physics. He is particularly interested in the roles that homotopy theory and higher category theory play in "quantization", a procedure physicists use to pass from a classical description of a physical system to a quantum one.

In his most recent publication, which will appear this fall in the Annals of Mathematics, he and his coauthors proved a conjecture made by Maxim Kontsevich, which connects ideas from algebraic geometry with quantization, using techniques inspired by homotopy theory and algebraic topology.

His current research interests include: the homotopy theory of homotopy algebras, operads and homotopical methods in deformation quantization, gerbes and equivariant cohomology, and higher categorical analogues of geometric quantization.

In June 2015, the American Mathematical Society and the Simons Foundation awarded Dr. Rogers with an AMS--Simons Travel Grant, to be used for research-related travel and to enhance the research environment of the mathematics department here at Lafayette.

Contact Dr. Rogers or learn more through these links:
chris.rogers@louisiana.edu
Chris Rogers' mathematics department site