About

I am currently a Senior Software Engineer at Qualcomm, working on computer graphics and GPU driver development. LinkedIn Profile.

Before joining Qualcomm I was an NSF Postdoc/Research Assistant Professor in the mathematics department at UIC, from Fall 2022–Spring 2025. I received my Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Georgia in 2022, under the direction of Valery Alexeev.

This webpage is my former academic webpage. Although I’m no longer in academia I am always happy to discuss math. You can contact me at schocknol@gmail.com.

Research

I am interested in algebraic geometry and tropical geometry. My research focuses in particular on intersection theory and birational geometry of moduli spaces of higher-dimensional varieties, and the use of tropical geometry in the study of such moduli spaces.

Papers

• Moduli of weighted stable marked cubic surfaces. Preprint, submitted (2024).

• The W(E_6)-invariant birational geometry of the moduli space of marked cubic surfaces. Math. Nachrichten (2024). arxiv

• Quasilinear tropical compactifications. Advances in Mathematics (2021).

• Intersection theory of the stable pair compactification of the moduli space of six lines in the plane. European Journal of Mathematics (2021). arxiv.

• Classically integral quadratic forms excepting at most two values, with M. Barowsky, W. Damron, A. Mejia, F. Saia, K. Thompson. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 146 (2018), 3661-3677.