https://gataslab.org/news/index.htmlWhat the lab has been up to — degrees conferred, awards, where people have landed, and where we have been speaking. Summer 2026 Four lab members spend the summer at national labs and Georgia Tech Andersen Wall at AFRL, Joana Bou Barcelo and Liam Kunzendorf at Georgia Tech, and George Rauta at ARL Adelphi. May 2026 Tyler Hanks and Luke Morris receive their PhDs The lab’s first two PhD graduates, hooded in May 2026 in front of a whiteboard still covered in sheaf notation.HugoenSat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://gataslab.org/news/summer-2026-placements/index.htmlSat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://gataslab.org/news/summer-2026-placements/index.htmlFour of the lab spent the summer away, at three institutions. Andersen Wall was at the Air Force Research Laboratory. Andersen’s work in the lab has been on structured decompositions and a category-theoretic approach to resource optimization, which he presented at the Undergraduate Mathematics Research Symposium and to the University Mathematics Society in Gainesville. Joana Bou Barcelo and Liam Kunzendorf were at Georgia Tech. Joana works on heterogeneous multi-agent multi-target tracking — she took that to the INFORMS Optimization Society Conference in Atlanta in March — and Liam works with George Rauta on Decapodes.jl.https://gataslab.org/news/hanks-morris-phd/index.htmlTue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://gataslab.org/news/hanks-morris-phd/index.htmlTyler Hanks and Luke Morris were both hooded in May 2026, the first two PhDs conferred out of the GATAS Lab. Both started in 2021, in CISE, and between them they account for a large share of what the lab has built. Tyler’s work is on the optimization and control side: compositional convex optimization, and a categorical framework for multistage control problems that became Modeling Model Predictive Control at ACC 2024. His thesis line runs through coordination sheaves — how you assemble a control problem out of parts and still say something about the whole.https://gataslab.org/news/bumpus-brazilian-category-theory/index.htmlMon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://gataslab.org/news/bumpus-brazilian-category-theory/index.htmlPaulo Vitor Macedo Dias, a student of lab alumnus Benjamin Merlin Bumpus at the University of São Paulo, has built Categorias Brasil — what Ben describes as a repository for all things category theory in Brasil. The site collects events, researchers, research labs, outreach material and research blogs in one place. The centrepiece is a roster of category theory researchers, kept current, and deliberately wide: pure category theorists and people applying categorical ideas in adjacent fields alike, students as well as established researchers, and Brasilians working abroad, so that the international reach of the community is visible rather than scattered.https://gataslab.org/news/rauta-wccm-eccomas/index.htmlWed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://gataslab.org/news/rauta-wccm-eccomas/index.htmlGeorge Rauta presented Low-Mach Compressible Navier–Stokes Using Discrete Exterior Calculus on Rectilinear Grids at WCCM–ECCOMAS in Munich, with James Fairbanks and Liam Kunzendorf as co-authors. The World Congress on Computational Mechanics and the ECCOMAS congress are where the computational mechanics community meets, which makes it a useful audience for the Decapodes argument: that writing a multiphysics model as a diagram of discrete exterior calculus operators is not only cleaner to state, but competitive to run.https://gataslab.org/news/bumpus-sao-paulo/index.htmlThu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://gataslab.org/news/bumpus-sao-paulo/index.htmlBenjamin Merlin Bumpus is a professor at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME) at the University of São Paulo, where he leads the CUÍCA lab — Categorical Understanding in Computation and Algorithms — and is part of the CombΘ research group. He announced it on Merlin’s Notebook in February 2026, having moved the previous semester: “as of today I am a professor at the Institute for Mathematics and Statistics at the Univesity of São Paulo (USP)!” — the delay, he explains, being that relocating to another continent is distracting, and that he had a first Carnaval to recover from.https://gataslab.org/news/leal-research-scientist/index.htmlThu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://gataslab.org/news/leal-research-scientist/index.htmlWilmer Leal became a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida in January 2026, working with the Nonlinear Controls and Robotics group. He came to Florida as a postdoctoral researcher in Computer Science in January 2023, after a PhD in Computer Science at Leipzig University and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, and degrees in both mathematics and chemistry from the University of Pamplona. In the GATAS Lab he worked on categorical models of compositionality in chemistry — the question of what it means for chemical structure to compose, and what a category-theoretic account of it buys you.https://gataslab.org/news/asemfl-rising-star/index.htmlWed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://gataslab.org/news/asemfl-rising-star/index.htmlThe Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine of Florida named James Fairbanks a Rising Star at its 2025 Annual Meeting in November. The Academy draws its membership from across the state’s universities — the banner behind the award lists FAMU, FIU, FSU, Palm Beach Atlantic, UCF, UF, Miami and USF — and the Rising Star award recognises early-career researchers among them.https://gataslab.org/news/siam-mds24-minisymposium/index.htmlMon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://gataslab.org/news/siam-mds24-minisymposium/index.htmlJames Fairbanks organised a minisymposium at the SIAM Conference on Mathematics of Data Science (MDS24), held in Atlanta in October 2024. The speakers, left to right above: Tyler Hanks, then a PhD student in the lab and now its first PhD graduate; Evan Patterson of the Topos Institute, whose group and ours maintain the AlgebraicJulia ecosystem together; Henry Adams of UF Mathematics; and James Fairbanks.https://gataslab.org/news/brown-topos/index.htmlSat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://gataslab.org/news/brown-topos/index.htmlKris Brown joined the Topos Institute as a research scientist in 2022, after his postdoc here. He was in the lab from 2021 to 2022, arriving from a PhD in chemical engineering at Stanford, and he left a large mark: he is the largest contributor to Catlab.jl and GATlab.jl, the libraries the rest of AlgebraicJulia is built on, and worked on ACSets.jl underneath them. His paper with Evan Patterson, Tyler Hanks and James Fairbanks on computational category-theoretic rewriting won best paper at ICGT 2022.