Thesis: "Volume growth and the topology of manifolds of nonnegative Ricci curvature"
Mike asked to study with me before coming to the CUNY Graduate Center. He began to work with me even before taking all his written qualifying exams. His oral qualifying exam was on Nonnegative Ricci Curvature focusing on the Abresch-Gromoll Excess Theorem and the Bishop-Gromov Volume Comparison Theorem. His thesis was based strongly on these theorems and Perelman's work. As a student, Mike also had an interest in Gromov-Hausdorff convergence, metric measure convergence and the mass transport approach to nonnegative Ricci curvature. In addition to the courses he took at CUNY, he attended classes taught by Professors Cheeger and Masmoudi at NYU.
When Mike graduated from CUNY he was offered an NSF International Postdoctoral Fellowship working with Peter Topping at Warwick University. and a position at City Tech. In the Fall of 2011, he began a tenure track position at the University of Missouri. His papers are available on the ArXiV.
Pedro's doctoral thesis concerns tangent bundles, holonomy groups and Gromov-Hausdorff convergence. He completed his first paper in August 2010 and his second paper in Spring 2011. Both are available on the ArXiV.
Pedro is now a postdoc at UC Riverside with Fred Wilhelm
Sajjad is a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center. He completed a masters at Tehran Polytechnic University before contacting me and coming to CUNY. In addition to his classes at CUNY, he has taken courses at Columbia with Hamilton and at Courant with Cheeger, Lin and Kleiner. Sajjad first completed a joint paper with me on smooth convergence away from singular sets which has been accepted for publication in Communications in Analysis and Geometry. He has built upon this work in a first solo preprint and has applied it to Ricci flow through singularities in another preprint. These two preprints will combine into his doctoral thesis. He has also written a paper with Michael Munn. All his preprints are available on the ArXiV.
Sajjad will work with Sturm as a postdoc at the Hausdorff Center in Bonn for the next few years after serving as a postdoc at MSRI as part of the Optimal Transport Program for the Fall semester.