I work in and around low-dimensional and geometric topology; most of my work revolves around surfaces and their mapping class groups. Recently, I have been interested in transformation groups in topology more generally, e.g., homeomorphism groups. My work is adjacent to geometric group theory. I also like to think about hyperbolic geomtery.
I work at the City University of New York, where I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Queens College and a member of the Doctoral Faculty in the Department of Mathematics at the Graduate Center. Previously, I was a postdoc at the University of Michigan, where my mentor was Dick Canary. I received my PhD in mathematics at Boston College under Martin Bridgeman and Ian Biringer (see my math genealogy).
I live in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn with my wife, two daughters, and two cats. My wife, Diana Hubbard, is also a mathematician. Though not a native New Yorker myself, my grandparents emigrated from Greece to NYC, settling in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens in the 1950s, where my father was born. I grew up in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, which is in the Poconos.