Dr Laura Wakelin

Biography

Dr Laura Wakelin is a Heilbronn Research Fellow in the Department of Mathematics, King’s College London. She completed her PhD through the London School of Geometry and Number Theory (LSGNT), graduating from Imperial College London in 2023 with the Yael Naim Dowker Prize for the best Mathematics PhD thesis. She subsequently spent a year as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics (MPIM) in Bonn, Germany.

Research interests

Laura’s research is in the field of low-dimensional topology. She is particularly interested in questions about Dehn surgery: a process which takes a knot K together with a rational number p/q and constructs a 3-dimensional manifold M. Does knowing M and p/q uniquely determine K? Does knowing M and K uniquely determine p/q? These questions are simple to state but require a variety of topological and geometric techniques to solve. She is also interested in 4-dimensional problems, such as using combinatorial techniques to build certain types of embedded surfaces.

Additional information

• Personal webpage