Contact Information

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About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of Bucknell University. I am passionate about inclusive STEM education, the mathematical foundations of computer science, and youth outreach. I used to be an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department of St. Mary's College of California.

I completed my PhD in 2023 as a part of the PPLV group in the Computer Science Department of University College London. My supervisers were the superstars Alexandra Silva and Jurriaan Rot. My PhD thesis is titled Coalgebraic Completeness Theorems for Effectful Process Algebras, and offers a general framework for axiomatizing process algebras that consist of action sequencing operators, an algebraic effect, and recursion. One of the main contributions of the framework, I would say, is how it handles unguarded recursive specifications. The work generalizes the completeness theorem for Guarded Kleene Algebra with Tests, or GKAT, from (Smolka et al, 2019). Effectful process algebras are closely connected but orthogonal to the calculi studied in Alexandra's PhD thesis.

Interests
I am generally interested in universal algebra and coalgebra, iteration theory, and process algebra, but on occasion I am willing to admit to my obession with generative systems of the form \(X \to MFX\), where \(M\) is a monad of some kind and \(F\) is some polynomial functor. I spend a lot of time thinking about monad presentations and final coalgebras. Recently, I have been working with behavioural differential equations, algebraic approaches to trace semantics, and lattices. I used to work with fractals and generative music. I still do, but I used to too.

If we happen share interests, please write! I'm always happy to make a new pen pal.

Below is a picture of a very much passed out Mabel.

A cute dog passed out.

Outside of theoretical computer science, I make electronic music, think about rescue dogs, and climb.

News

12/2024 The paper I wrote with Tobias Kappé in the fall, A General Completeness Theorem for Skip-free Star Algebras was accepted at FoSSaCS 2025. Click for the full version of the paper.
10/2024 The paper I wrote with Corina Cirstea, Lawrence Moss, Victoria Noquez, Alexandra Silva and Ana Sokolova this summer, A Complete Inference System for Probabilistic Infinite Trace Equivalence, was accepted at CSL 2025. See you in Amsterdam!
10/2024 In September of last year, Tobias Kappé found a hole in the completeness proof for skip-free GKAT that we published at ESOP 2023 along with Alexandra Silva. Thankfully, we had another completeness proof (using a different technique) in our pocket, so we knew that the result was still correct, at least. But we wanted to fix the proof technique we used in that paper, so we went to work. Soon after, we produced the completeness proof that appeared in my thesis. We just put a new and improved, polished and presentable version of the paper on arXiv. The proof ended up being much harder (and even more interesting) than we thought.
07/2024 Along with Corina Cirstea, Larry Moss, Tori Noquez, Alexandra Silva, and Ana Sokolova, I took part in the Summer Research in Mathematics program at SLMath (formerly MSRI) in Berkeley. We are very happy that we did, in fact, prove our theorem (more news to come, hopefully).
07/2024 As of today, I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Bucknell University!
05/2024 I gave a talk about star fragments in the LLAMA Seminar at the ILLC.
01/2024 My thesis corrections were finally approved and my thesis is now somewhere in the UCL database! If you find it, please let me know, because I haven't been able to. I put a copy of it here instead.
10/2023 I was invited to give a talk at the Boston Computation Club! It was a tutorial on coequations based on my paper with Fred Dahlqvist.
09/2023 I gave a talk on transition systems, generative music, and fractals at the Saint Mary's College of California Math Colloquium.
07/2023 As of today, I am an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at St Mary's College!
06/2023 At CALCO, Victoria Noquez presented our framework for interpreting certain process terms as recipes for fractal sets. Based on the paper Fractals from Regular Behaviours, authored by myself, Victoria Noquez, and Larry Moss. Actually, we won Best Paper at CALCO!
06/2023 My PhD viva took place. I passed!
04/2023 I presented a completeness theorem for Skip-free Guarded Kleene Algebra with Tests at ESOP, based on the paper by Tobias Kappé, myself, and Alexandra Silva.
04/2023 Taught a class on Sonic Pi as part of the youth outreach event Expanding Your Horizons.
02/2023 I was an invited speaker in the Cornell University Programming Languages Discussion Group (PLDG).
11/2022 I was an invited speaker in the Boston University POPV seminar. While I was there, I got to talk shop with Cheng Zhang and Arthur Azevedo de Amorim about commutative Kleene algebra (wow that stuff is hard).
11/2022 I visited Larry Moss and Victoria Noquez at Indiana University Bloomington. I was also an invited speaker in the IU Bloomington Logic Seminar, where I talked about my recipes for process calculi.
08/2022 Research visit from Tobias Kappé. Took an honest crack at proving completeness of GKAT, and we got as far as completeness for skip-free GKAT!
08/2022 Had a blast presenting some monads on Pos at BLAST 2022.
07/2022 Presented the processes parametrised by framework at ICALP 2022.
05/2022 Research visit from Wojtek Rozowski.
04/2022 Research visit from Jana Wagemaker. Started thinking about how to add hypotheses to GKAT.
04/2022 Internship at Cornell University begins.
02/2022 Day trip to Rice University, in Houston, Texas, to visit Konstaninos Mamouras. Ate authentic Texas BBQ and gave a lecture on the free algebra construction.
02/2022 Appointment at Radboud University ended. Unofficially borrowed an office at LSU, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
09/2021 Became a guest researcher in the Software Sciences group at Radboud University, in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
08/2021 Presented at MFPS 2021 and then promptly slept in for Fred Dahlqvist's presentation of our Pearl submission at CALCO 2021 (In my defense, it was very early in the morning because I was on the other side of the world!).
07/2021 Presented at ICALP 2021.
09/2019 Started my PhD studies with the PPLV group at UCL, in London, UK.