I had the chance to participate in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum and I met many like-minded students and role models who shared the mathematics that passionates them, all while being exposed to novel ideas in a diverse background and an invigorating setting. I subsequently decided to work hard on promoting mathematics and creating more opportunities for my peers in the sciences, and the Hong Kong Laureate Forum serves a similar purpose and could help me once again to grow as a student and mathematician, but even more so as a person!

I hope to develop my skills by complementing my academic experience with public speaking, listening, and cross-disciplinary problem-solving. As a new graduate student, I realize that the next few steps of my mathematical journey will be the most important: I need to create more opportunities for myself to do research, meet colleagues and collaborators, and learn about the work of others. While my volunteer and research experiences allowed me to collaborate with several bright students and experienced professors who shared their passion for mathematics with me and who taught me that mathematicians are more than researchers and teachers, I hope to complement it with my participation at the HKLF.

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University of Toronto, Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences

My research program aims to get a better understanding of lattice models in statistical physics and their connections with complex analysis, function spaces, and random matrix theory. The study of random systems at criticality appearing in these settings is part of probability theory, but there is a rich interplay with other fields such as analysis, geometry, and combinatorics, which I find fascinating.

In particular, I am interested in Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE), which should be thought of as a family of random curves that are conjectured to be the scaling limits of the various interfaces in critical lattice models. Some of these conjectures have been verified in recent years, but most are still open and are the subject of intense research, both in mathematics and theoretical physics. The study of SLE allowed experts to prove several physics predictions, which includes giving a rigorous understanding of conformal field theory via a recent approach to Liouville quantum gravity. I will explore this connection further in my PhD thesis by studying the geometry arising from random surfaces.