Lutian Zhao
I am a Project Researcher at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), University of Tokyo.
I work in algebraic geometry. My interests include moduli of sheaves, perverse sheaves, and moduli of parabolic Higgs bundles.
- lutian dot zhao at ipmu dot jp
- Position
- Project Researcher, Kavli IPMU
- Institution
- University of Tokyo, Kashiwa
Background
Before coming to Tokyo I was a Serguei Novikov Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park, where my mentor was Amin Gholampour.
I received my Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2021 from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, under the supervision of Sheldon Katz, with a dissertation on Gopakumar–Vafa invariants and the Macdonald formula. Before that I took my bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Zhiyuan College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in 2015.
Grants & awards
- 2025–27
- JSPS KAKENHI, Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists, JP25K17226 — Moduli spaces of sheaves from geometry and physics
- 2020
- Irving Reiner Memorial Award in Algebra, University of Illinois
Research
Broadly, I study moduli spaces attached to curves and surfaces and the cohomological invariants they carry. Recent work has centred on the tame parahoric nonabelian Hodge correspondence, integrable systems arising from parabolic and parahoric Higgs bundles, and Gopakumar–Vafa invariants computed through perverse sheaves.
A full list is on the publications page.