The crepant resolutions of a singular threefold are related by a finite sequence of birational maps called flops. In the simplest cases, this network of flops is governed by simple combinatorics. I will begin the talk with an overview of flops and crepant resolutions. I will then move on to explain how their underlying combinatorial structure can be abstracted to define the notion of a cluster category.

Let $G$ be a $p$-adic Lie group. From the perspective of $p$-adic manifolds, possibly the most natural $p$-adic representations of $G$ to consider are the locally analytic ones.  Motivated by work of Pan, when $G$ acts on a rigid analytic variety $X$ (e.g., the flag variety), we would like to geometrise locally analytic $G$-representations, via a covariant localisation theory which should intertwine Schneider-Teitelbaum's duality with the $p$-adic Beilinson-Bernstein localisation. I will report some partial progress in the simplified situation when we replace $G$ by its germ at $1$. The main ingredient is an infinite jet bundle $\mathcal{J}^\omega_X$ which is dual to $\widehat{\mathcal{D}}_X$. Our "co"localisation functor is given by a coinduction to $\mathcal{J}^\omega_X$. Work in progress.

Perverse sheaves are an indispensable tool in geometric representation theory that can be used to construct representations and compute composition multiplicities. These ‘sheaves’ live in a certain $\ell$-adic derived category. In this talk we will discuss a beautiful construction of this category based on the pro-étale topology and explore some applications in representation theory.

Factorization homology is an arguably abstract formalism which produces
well-behaved topological invariants out of certain "higher algebraic"
structures. In this talk, I'll explain how this formalism can be made
fairly concrete in the case where this input algebraic structure is a
braided tensor category. If the category at hand is semi-simple, this in
fact essentially recovers skein categories and skein algebras. I'll
present various applications of this formalism to quantum topology and
representation theory.
 

I will describe the proof of the following classification result for manifolds with positive scalar curvature. Let M be a closed manifold of dimension $n=4$ or $5$ that is "sufficiently connected", i.e. its second fundamental group is trivial (if $n=4$) or second and third fundamental groups are trivial (if $n=5$). Then a finite covering of $M$ is homotopy equivalent to a sphere or a connect sum of $S^{n-1} \times S^1$. The proof uses techniques from minimal surfaces, metric geometry, geometric group theory. This is a joint work with Otis Chodosh and Chao Li.