Sudipta Ghosh receives the 2021 Pasquale Porcelli Graduate Student Research Excellence Award. Sudipta Ghosh is working on a Ph.D. under Professors Scott Baldridge and Shea Vela-Vick. His research is devoted to the modern aspects of the topology of 3- and 4-manifolds. In particular, together with Zhenkun Li, a postdoc at Stanford, he was able to generalize Kronheimer and Mrowka’s results on the instanton Floer homology. So far, two papers with Zhenkun Li are posted on the arXiv and submitted for publication, one of them with collaboration from Michael Wong, a former LSU postdoc, now a postdoc at Dartmouth. Moreover, in an upcoming paper, Sudipta Ghosh and Ian Zemke, Assistant Professor at Princeton, prove an important result about the gauge-theoretic version of Heegaard Floer homology. The Pasquale Porcelli Certificate of Excellence in Research goes to Jagdeep Singh, who is working on a Ph.D. under Professor James Oxley in Combinatorics.
The Pasquale Porcelli Award for Graduate Research Excellence and the Certificate are awarded each fall semester to graduate students who show the greatest promise of making significant contributions to mathematical research, both as graduate students and in their subsequent careers. The award is funded by the Dr. Pasquale Porcelli Math Fund. Porcelli was a mathematics professor at LSU from 1959 until his death in 1972. He was made Boyd Professor—the highest LSU rank—in 1965.