Congratulations to Johnny Nicholson who has been awarded a three-year Rankin-Sneddon Research Fellowship at the University of Glasgow. The Rankin-Sneddon fellowship will give Johnny the opportunity to continue his own independent research programme within the School of Mathematics and Statistics.

Following his PhD from UCL in 2021 under the supervision of Francis Johnson, Johnny joined Imperial College London as a Heilbronn Research Fellow working in algebraic topology. His current work is on classification problems in low-dimensional topology and their interactions with areas of algebra such as homological group theory and integral representation theory. He was recently awarded a Fields Research Fellowship by the Fields Institute in Toronto, which he will use to pursue a research collaboration with Ian Hambleton (McMaster), as well as a Heilbronn Focused Research Grant which he will use to organise a meeting titled “Algebraic methods in 4-manifold topology” with Mark Powell (Glasgow). Johnny’s recent paper “The homotopy type of a finite 2-complex with non-minimal Euler characteristic” resolves a conjecture of C. T. C. Wall on the topology of 2-dimensional CW-complexes which had been open since the 1970s.

We wish Johnny every success in his new position and future research.