by Kelly Jabbusch

I'm Kelly Jabbusch and for the next year I have joined the department as a Visiting Assistant Professor.  I grew up in Seattle, Washington, and attended Willamette University in Salem, Oregon where I earned a Bachelor's degree in mathematics and German.  I returned to Seattle to attend graduate school at the University of Washington, and received my PhD in mathematics in June 2007.  Just three weeks after defending my thesis, and even before the official graduation, my husband, Chris and I packed up all our belongings, put most into storage and moved the rest with us to Cologne, Germany, where I began a post-doc at the University of Cologne.  The idea was to be there for two years and then return to the United States, but we didn't quite follow the plan.  Instead, our family grew from two to three with the birth of our daughter, Myrna, in November 2008.  A few months later we had a semester-long stay in Berkeley, California at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and then returned to Germany.  This time, though, it was Freiburg, and only for a few months.  From there, we made our way to Stockholm, Sweden, where I worked at the Royal Institute of Technology for a year and a half.  It's been a crazy four years with lots of changes, but I had so many great opportunities living in Europe, and I wouldn't change a thing about our adventures.

My research is in algebraic geometry, specifically studying how positivity properties of line bundles and more generally vector bundles can help classify varieties.  More recently, I've been studying toric varieties, which lie at the intersection of algebraic geometry and convex geometry. I've always been proud to tell friends and family that my research is strictly "pure mathematics," and has no application to the "real world;" but in the last few months I've been proven wrong as I learned about applications of algebraic geometry that appear in coding theory, biostatistics, engineering problems, and more.

 The entire family loves traveling and cooking.  I also am always eager to get out of the house and go for a run.