Our Summer Research Associates in 2024
Another year, another cohort of wonderful Summer Research Associates (RAs) at Topos working on exciting projects. As is now the custom, we’ve asked each of them to introduce themselves and write a little bit about what they’ll be working on over the summer. You can expect to see some blog posts with more specific details on their research as time goes on, but for now I’ll leave you with their short bios.
It’s the time of year where we welcome our Summer Research Associates (RAs) to Topos. These early-career researchers bring with them not just technical knowledge and capability, but also their perspectives on the sort of culture that we should be actively cultivating within Topos. We are very lucky to be able to award these positions, which are a key part of our academic community building mission. This year, we also have a Summer Visting Scholar, who will be working with one of our fantastic Senior Advisors, Dana Scott.
C.B. Aberlé is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is studying for a PhD in Pure and Applied Logic, advised by Frank Pfenning. Before that, she studied Computer Science and Philosophy at Merton College, University of Oxford, obtaining a BA in 2023. She is interested in developing logical frameworks and programming languages that are up to the task of formalizing modern mathematics – pure and applied – and facilitating productive interplay between proving and programming while also interfacing with the broader world. For this purpose she seeks to understand the abstract, mathematical principles behind the processes of abstraction and interaction at the heart of mathematics and its applications. Previously, she has worked on categorical semantics of linear dependent type theory, and recently presented a category-theoretic treatment of parametricity in cohesive homotopy type theory. This Summer, she worked with David Spivak on developing the categorical semantics of dependent type theory in terms of polynomial functors and natural models.
Keri D’Angelo is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Cornell University, advised by Dexter Kozen. She received her M.S. in Pure Mathematics from Florida State University. Keri’s research interests are in coalgebras and Homotopy Type Theory, but she has a strong interest in Applied Category Theory in general for its use in bringing people from different fields together under one common language. At Topos this summer, she is working with Sophie Libkind on using wiring diagrams for composing instantaneous machines.
Owen Haaga is DPhil student at Oxford University, working in the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the School of Geography and the Environment to build forecasting models of labour markets. His thesis involves Systems Dynamics and Agent Based Modeling, so he is spending a summer at Topos exploring the application of new Algebraic Julia libraries to these types of models.
Owen holds an MA from the University of Maryland, an MPhil from Cambridge University, and a BA from Vanderbilt University, all in Economics. He has worked in the public, private, and non-profit sectors, mostly doing (and communicating the results of) quantitative social scientific research.
He is particularly interested in the potential for category theory to enable interdisciplinary collaboration between modelers from different backgrounds in the social and natural sciences.
As well as the three Summer RAs above, we are delighted to have a Summer Visiting Scholar who will be working mostly with Dana Scott.
Eric Boniface is a math PhD student at UC Berkeley. Their research interests are in mathematical logic, computer algebra, and applied algebraic geometry. This summer they are working with Dana Scott and Evan Patterson to extend GATlab, a Julia package for modeling and programming generalized algebraic theories. They are working to represent regular, coherent, and geometric categories in GATlab to extend this package to reason about theories with quantifiers. In a similar direction, they are also interested in the interactions between categorical logic and classical first order model theory.
