Congratulations to Sean Dewar who has been offered a Senior Postdoctoral position at KU Leuven starting in November 2025.  

Sean completed his PhD at Lancaster University in 2019 under the supervision of Derek Kitson.  His main area of research is Geometric Rigidity Theory: the study of how constraint systems – discretely-defined structures with geometric constraints between them – can be deformed.  Following two Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Fields Institute in Mathematical Sciences in Toronto and the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics in Linz, Sean was awarded a Heilbronn Fellowship in Bristol in 2022.

During the last couple of years, Sean was awarded funding for three successful conference and workshops that took place here in Bristol.  A One Day Conference in Combinatorics, and two Focused Research Workshops on Rigid Cube Complexes and their Applications to Geometric Group Theory and on Intersections: Rigidity Theory Techniques for Erdős Distance Problems. 

Sean’s paper with Farhad Babaee and James Maxwell, ‘Extremal Decompositions of Tropical Varieties and Relations with Rigidity Theory’ will be published early next year in Journal of Symbolic Computation – available online at  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsc.2025.102461

We wish Sean every success in his new position and future research!