Supervision

Supervision of bachelor and master theses

If you are interested in Differential Geometry/Topology, feel free to contact me to ask about supervising your thesis (and we can discuss to find a suitable topic). These are the areas I am most familiar with:

  • Contact and Symplectic Topology
  • h-Principle (i.e. topological methods to construct/classify geometric structures)
  • Topology of manifolds
  • Subriemannian Geometry (i.e. the theory of subbundles of the tangent bundle)
  • Poisson Geometry (particularly its topological aspects)

I would also be happy to chat if you are interested in Lorentz/Riemannian Geometry or Geometric Analysis.

Postdocs

PhD students

  • Douwe Hoekstra: TBA. Expected defense date: September 2028.
  • Sergio Sierra: TBA (cosupervisors: F. Presas, L. Toussaint). Expected defense date: TBA
  • Wei Zhou: Flexibility and rigidity for maximally non-integrable distributions (cosupervisors: E. Fernández, F. Presas). Expected defense date: January 2026.
  • Aaron Gootjes-Dreesbach: Non-local differential relations. Defense date: December 2025.
  • Anna Fokma: Jiggling and wrinkling (cosupervisor: L. Toussaint). Defense date: November 2025.
  • Francisco Javier Martínez Aguinaga: Global aspects of bracket-generating distributions (cosupervisor: F. Presas). Defense date: April 2023.
  • Lauran Toussaint: Contact Structures and Codimension-one Symplectic Foliations (cosupervisor: M. Crainic). Defense date: March 2020.

Master students

  • Fabio de Moor. Applying manifold calculus to totally nonparallel Immersions (cosupervised by G. Heuts). October 2024 to July 2025.
  • Sam Lindauer: Differential forms in Lean (cosupervised by J. Commelin). September 2024 to June 2025.
  • Changyi Guan. An Introduction to Parametric Morse Theory and Pseudo-Isotopies (cosupervised by L. Toussaint). February 2024 to February 2025.
  • Ket Bottelier. The Nash-Moser theorem and the h-principle. September 2023 to November 2024.
  • Lay de Jong. Stable hamiltonian structures. September 2023 to June 2024.
  • Esther Steenkamer. Removal of singularities through hierarchies of singularities (cosupervised by A. Gootjes-Dreesbach). September 2023 to June 2024.
  • Marien Hofstee. Stability of Higher Dimensional Black Holes in Warped Spacetimes (cosupervised by T. Hinderer). September 2023 to June 2024.
  • Caspar Meijs. Arboreal singularities. September 2022 to July 2023.
  • Floor ter Haar. (2,3,5) distributions. September 2022 to July 2023.
  • Nina Rutten: (4,6) elliptic distributions. September 2022 to July 2023.
  • Frank Imbens. Black holes and symplectic geometry (cosupervised by T. Hinderer). January 2022 to February 2023.
  • Giacomo Cristinelli: Anisotropic deformation on contact three-manifolds. March 2021 to March 2022.
  • Bas de Pooter: Differential relations with delay (cosupervised by A. Gootjes-Dreesbach). October 2020 to July 2021.
  • Jan Denkers: Semifree and totally non-parallel immersions. Feb 2020 to July 2021.
  • Lotte Bruijnen: Filtered structures. July 2019 to August 2020.

Bachelor students

  • Joris Jan de Groot. Kuperberg’s plug. February 2025 to June 2025.
  • Geert Simon Aanen. Diffeomorphisms of the 3-ball. February 2025 to June 2025.
  • Pjotr Vugts. Knot theory, the Jones polynomial and Khovanov homology (cosupervised by G. Boyde). February 2025 to June 2025.
  • Thijmen Kruithof. Knots and Convex Surfaces in Contact 3-Manifolds. May 2024 to February 2025.
  • Annalies Robertus. Observability for spacelike slicings in relativistic spacetimes (cosupervised by T. Hinderer). February to June 2024.
  • Juan Azcue. Critical points in Symplectic Topology. September 2023 to June 2024.
  • Chris van Noorden. Constructing Morse homology. January to June 2023.
  • Simon Vos. Sub-Riemannian Geometry and Electromagnetism in General Relativity (cosupervised by T. Hinderer). January to June 2023.
  • Koen Olij. Groups of polynomial growth. December 2022 to June 2023.
  • Arthur van Ooijen. Foliations and homotopies (cosupervised by A. Fokma). December 2022 to June 2023.
  • Andrea Wiendels. Exploring 3-manifolds: Morse theory, lens spaces, and Heegaard splittings. November 2022 to June 2023.
  • Niallan Blauw. The event horizon of a merger between a small and a large black hole (cosupervised by T. Hinderer). September 2022 to June 2023.
  • Sam Lindauer: Horizontal knots in Martinet distributions (cosupervised by A. Gootjes-Dreesbach). November 2021 to June 2022.
  • Esther Steenkamer: Fundamentals of Geometric Analysis. October 2021 to June 2022.
  • Jelle Draijer: An Exploration of Gauge Theory and Spinors on a Spacetime Manifold (cosupervised by Dirk Schuricht). February to July 2021.
  • Mick Schilder: Regular Homotopies and the Sphere Eversion (cosupervised by A. Gootjes-Dreesbach). February to July 2021.
  • Hanneke Schroten: Geodesics in semi-Riemannian Geometry and links to General Relativity (cosupervised by T. Grimm). February to July 2021.
  • Ket Bottelier: Semi-Riemannian Geometry and Wavefronts in GR (cosupervised by T. Hinderer and R. Versendaal). February to July 2021.
  • Floor ter Haar: Constructing distributions in low dimensions. August 2020 to January 2021.
  • Juri Sampieri Bjornsson: Semiriemannian structures and rolling. May 2020 to January 2021.
  • Robin van de Griend: Simplicial Complexes and Persistent Homology. March to June 2020.