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Personal Profile of Dr. Jennifer Schultens

Dr. Jennifer Schultens
Professor
University of California, Davis
Department of Mathematics
Professor
University of California, Davis
Department of Mathematics

Home Page: http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~jcs

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3898-0051

Biography
Jennifer Schultens received her Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara in 1993 under the direction of Marty Scharlemann. Her dissertation, entitled ``Classification of Heegaard splittings of some Seifert fibered spaces" laid the foundation for an investigation of a variety of issues in low-dimensional topology, often centered around surfaces in 3-manifolds. Jennifer Schultens joined the faculty in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Emory University from 1993 until 2003, gaining tenure in 1999. From 1995 to 1997, she took time off from her tenure track job to spend time at UC Berkeley (``Cal") as an NSF postdoc. During this time she also partook of the program in low-dimensional topology at MSRI during the 1996/1997 academic year. One event from that year she will always remember: Bernie Ng Tu Pholeate's lecture, delivered on 4/1/1997, on ``Taut conflagrations". (The scheduled speaker was unavailable and the lecture was given, instead, by Bill Thurston.) In 2003, Jennifer Schultens joined the faculty at UC Davis, together with her husband Misha Kapovich. She has been a Full Professor at UC Davis since 2007. She has published two books: "Introduction to 3-manifolds" and (with Toshio Saito and Martin Scharlemann) "Lecture Notes on Generalized Heegaard Splittings". In addition to research in low-dimensional topology, she enjoys thinking about elementary geometry and how to teach it. Outside of mathematics, Jennifer Schultens enjoys parenting (most of the time), reading (especially Herodotus and Proust), cleaning, puns (good and bad), and style mash-ups of every type.