C&O welcomes four new faculty members

The C&O department is very pleased to welcome four new faculty members, Assistant Professors Logan Crew, Stephen Melczer, Oliver Pechenik and Sophie Spirkl.

Logan Crew completed his Ph.D. in 2020 in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Pennyslvania. His supervisors were Professors Jim Haglund and Greta Panova. Logan's Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Vertex-weighted generalizations of chromatic symmetric functions". His research field is algebraic combinatorics, with a focus on symmetric functions.

Stephen Melczer returns to Waterloo after completing postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Quebec at Montreal and the University of Pennsylvania. His research field is analytic combinatorics. More precisely, he uses computational algebraic geometry, analysis and topology to study problems in combinatorics, computer science and mathematics. He is author of the textbook An Invitation to Analytic Combinatorics: From One to Several Variables, and a co-author of the article Combinatorial Adventures in Analysis, Algebra and Topology that recently appeared in the Notices of the AMS.

Oliver Pechenik's research is in algebraic combinatorics, with a focus on dynamics, modern symmetric function theory, and relations

to Schubert calculus. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, writing a thesis on K-theoretic Schubert calculus and applications. This was followed by a one-year term as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University and a three-year term as Assistant Professor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.

Sophie Spirkl completed her Ph.D. in 2018 in the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University. Her supervisors were the renowned graph theorists, Maria Chudnovsky and Paul Seymour. She then held an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University and Princeton University. Sophie's research focuses on structural graph theory, and in particular on the effect of excluding certain local patterns on global properties of the graph, e.g. related to coloring. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Cliques, stables sets, and coloring in graphs with forbidden induced subgraphs".