It is my very great pleasure to introduce Alex Manchester (they/them) as our new Mathematics, Statistics and Computational Sciences Librarian. Alex comes to Stanford from Rice University, where they received their Ph.D. in Mathematics this Spring. Alex’s mathematics research focused on certain special types of knots and links, and their relationship to spaces which locally look like 4-dimensional Euclidean space (in the same way that the surface of the Earth locally looks like 2-dimensional Euclidean space). Their preprints “Action of the Mazur pattern up to topological concordance” and “New examples of topologically slice links” are available on arXiv. During their graduate years, Alex co-organized a log cabin conference on concordance and knotted surfaces, as well as the concordance section of the Nearly Carbon Neutral Geometry and Topology Conference. They have also been the instructor of record for Calculus 2 and Linear Algebra at Rice. Prior to graduate work, Alex received a B.S. in Mathematics with Departmental Honors from the University of Chicago in 2019.
Outside of academia, Alex has been involved with the Hatch Youth program at the Montrose Center, an after-school program providing tutoring and social activities aimed at LGBTQ youth, as well as Math Exp(lorations) in the Houston area. They have also privately tutored students in mathematics throughout graduate school. In Chicago, they served as a counselor in the Young Scholars Program, supporting high school students taking classes on knot theory and non-Euclidean geometry with daily problem/discussion sections.
During the past year, Alex has worked as the Mathematics Collection Development Assistant at Rice's Fondren Library. They have assisted with the selection and acquisition of new books, as well as the weeding of damaged and outdated books in the collection. Additionally, Alex contributes to online research guides, particularly the guide on mathematics and guide on artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on the history of math and the relationship between AI and accessibility. They have taught some of the library's LaTeX/Overleaf workshops, and they are also funded as a Fondren Fellow to collect oral histories of people who are or have been associated with Rice University's mathematics department. Through their work at Rice's library, Alex has enjoyed seeing how research and information is managed and delivered to users, and they are excited to move into the world of subject librarianship at Stanford.
In their spare time, Alex is looking forward to exploring the contra dance community in the Bay Area and to taking advantage of the many opportunities for hiking. They also enjoy choral singing and was in a choir focusing on music from the Renaissance period for four years.
Alex will start on April 15, 2024 and will be based in the Robin Li and Melissa Ma Science Library, in the Sapp Center for Science Teaching and Learning. Please join me in welcoming Alex Manchester to Stanford!