In this talk I will review some recent results obtained in collaboration with E. Runa and A. Kerschbaum on the one-dimensionality of the minimizers
of a family of continuous local/nonlocal interaction functionals in general dimension. Such functionals have a local term, typically the perimeter or its Modica-Mortola approximation, which penalizes interfaces, and a nonlocal term favouring oscillations which are high in frequency and in amplitude. The competition between the two terms is expected by experiments and simulations to give rise to periodic patterns at equilibrium. Functionals of this type are used  to model pattern formation, either in material science or in biology. The difficulty in proving the emergence of such structures is due to the fact that the functionals are symmetric with respect to permutation of coordinates, while in more than one space dimensions minimizers are one-dimesnional, thus losing the symmetry property of the functionals. We will present new techniques and results showing that for two classes of functionals (used to model generalized anti-ferromagnetic systems, respectively  colloidal suspensions), both in sharp interface and in diffuse interface models, minimizers are one-dimensional and periodic, in general dimension and also while imposing a nontrivial volume constraint.

I will present a four-term exact sequence relating the cohomology of a fibration to the cohomology of an open set obtained by removing the preimage of a general linear section of the base. This exact sequence respects three filtrations, the Hodge, weight, and perverse Leray filtrations, so that it is an exact sequence of mixed 
Hodge structures on the graded pieces of the perverse Leray filtration. I claim that this sequence should be thought of as a mirror to the Clemens-Schmid sequence describing the structure of a degeneration and formulate a "mirror P=W" conjecture relating the filtrations on each side. Finally, I will present evidence for this conjecture coming from the K3 surface setting. This is joint work with Charles F. Doran.

Sela proved in 2006 that the (non abelian) free groups are stable. This implies the existence of a well-behaved forking independence relation, and raises the natural question of giving an algebraic description in the free group of this model-theoretic notion. In a joint work with Rizos Sklinos we give such a description (in a standard fg model F, over any set A of parameters) in terms of the JSJ decomposition of F over A, a geometric group theoretic tool giving a group presentation of F in terms of a graph of groups which encodes much information about its automorphism group relative to A. The main result states that two tuples of elements of F are forking independent over A if and only if they live in essentially disjoint parts of such a JSJ decomposition.