My name is Sierra and I am a PhD Student at Georgia Tech currently in my final year. My research is in symplectic and contact topology and my advisor is John Etnyre. I am interested in low-dimensional topology, specifically 4-manifolds which have the structure of a Lefschetz fibration as well as Lagrangian cobordisms of Legendrian knots in contact 3-manifolds.
My favorite Lefschetz fibrations have genus-2 fibers. I enjoy asking questions about the fundamental group, proving the existence of a holomorphic structure, and uncovering new identity factorizations of the mapping class group. I also try to see how Lefschetz fibrations decompose into into neighborhoods of divisors and their complement.
I run the Directed Reading Program at Georgia Tech alongside Noah Solomon, so feel free to reach out in you’re interested in joining (either as a mentor or mentee)!
Click here for most recent CV.
Click here to view an example of my Differential Calculus’ Course Home Page on Canvas (GT’s LMS)
I am (and was previously) supported by the RTG Graduate Fellowship, Larry S. O’Hara Graduate Scholarship, President’s Fellowship, Goizueta Fellowship, and the Pathbreakers Fellowship.
Contact: sknavel3 (at) gatech (dot) edu
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Pictured is me at Rattlesnake Ledge Trail in King County, Washington, 2025.
Land acknowledgement
Georgia Tech is built on the ancestral lands of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy, and the Cherokee Nation held land nearby. Both tribes were forced off of their land in the 1830s and marched the infamous Trail of Tears. Today, Georgia remains home to the Lower Muscogee Creek Tribe and Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee.
Site last updated September 2025.