On 8 November 2019, the Belgian-Dutch Algebraic Geometry seminar will take place in Antwerp. The speakers are Lie Fu, Špela Špenko and Stefan Kebekus. See the seminar website for more details.

We are very excited that Lie Fu has joined us as Radboud Excellence Fellow for a period of 2 years, starting September 2019.

We are very excited that this academic year Paul Arne Østvaer will be visiting our department on a Radboud Excellence Professorship for twice a period of 2 months. Together with Paul Arne and Steffen Sagave, I have organized a workshop on Algebraic Geometry and Homotopy Theory, which has been a very nice event!

On 21 June 2019, the Belgian-Dutch Algebraic Geometry seminar took place in Amsterdam. The speakers are Diletta Martinelli, Zsolt Patakfalvi and Yichao Tian. See the seminar website for more details.

Lenny Taelman and I have obtained an NWO TOP1 grant for our project Geometry and arithmetic beyond Shimura varieties. Zoë Schroot and Pablo Magni have been appointed as PhD students in this project, and Simon Pepin Lehalleur will join us in January 2020 as a postdoc on this project.

My former PhD student Qizheng Yin is the first recipient of the Algebraic Geometry Prize for his paper on tautological classes that was part of his PhD thesis. Congratulations to Qizheng!

On Friday, July 7, Johan Commelin will defend this PhD thesis. The ceremony starts at 2.30pm. In the morning there are two lectures by Anna Cadoret and Rutger Noot. You can find more details on the programme here.

On April 21, we are hosting a session of the Intercity Seminar Number Theory. We have a fantastic line-up: the speakers are Giuseppe Ancona, Yohan Brunebarbe, Lars Halle and Olivier Wittenberg. For the programme, abstracts and practical information, see the ICS website maintained by Bart de Smit.

This semester I'm running a Seminar on Perverse Sheaves and Applications. If you want to participate, let me know and I'll put you on the mailing list.

We are very pleased to have Arne Smeets in our group as of this academic year!