My name is Sierra and I am a fifth year PhD Student at Georgia Tech. 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 and 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.
See below for most recent CV.
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
Site last updated Feb 2025.
Here is my CV (last updated June 2024):
Pictured is me at Rattlesnake Ledge Trail in Washington.
The things I love most in the world:
- my family & friends
- my cats
- a cool breeze on a hot summer day and a warm fire on a cold winter day