Em-Cats Virtual Seminar

About

Emerging Researchers in Category Theory (Em-Cats) is a program that aims to assist graduate students in Category Theory in giving excellent talks. It is led and taught by Dr Eugenia Cheng.

In 2023, the Em-Cats program will be offering assistance to graduate students and early researchers who have talks accepted at The International Category Theory Conference (CT 2023), held 2–8 July 2023 at UCLouvain, Belgium. Please note that this program is independent of the organization of the conference and is not officially part of it.

We're pleased to announce that the participants in the 2023 Em-Cats program are:

Rhiannon Griffiths (Cornell University),
Ryuya Hora (The University of Tokyo),
Yuto Kawase (Kyoto University),
Marcello Lanfranchi (Dalhousie University), and
Joshua Wrigley (Università degli Studi dell'Insubria).

Aims

The aims of the Em-Cats Virtual Seminar are, broadly:

Help the next generation of category theorists become wonderful speakers.
Make use of the virtual possibilities, and give opportunities to graduate students in places where there is not a category theory group or local seminar they can usefully speak in.
Give an opportunity to graduate students to have a global audience, especially giving more visibility to students from less famous/large groups.
Make a general opportunity for community among category theorists who are more isolated than those with local groups.
Make a series of truly intelligible talks, which we hope students and researchers around the world will enjoy and appreciate.

Talk Preparation and Guidelines

Eugenia Cheng has experience with training graduate students in talk-giving, from when she ran a seminar in mathematical presentations for graduate students at the University of Sheffield. Everyone did indeed give an excellent talk. We ask that all participants in the Em-Cats Program are willing to work with Dr Cheng and follow her advice to make sure their talk is excellent. The guidelines document outlines what she believes constitutes a good talk.

Dr Cheng is confident that with her assistance everyone who wishes to do so will be able to give an excellent, accessible talk, and that this will benefit both the speaker and the community.

For 2023 the assistance is directly aimed at the CT2023 conference and will largely consist of help with slides, and a one hour virtual meeting. Dr Cheng will be in the UK for the two weeks preceding CT, and is prepared to do meetings between 9am and 9pm UK time. If this does not fit with your time zone then a meeting might not be possible, but some limited help could be provided by email.

Meetings are likely to be on Friday June 23rd, Sunday June 25th, and Friday June 30th (UK time) so please hold some time available on those days to help with scheduling.