Dr. Allison Moore’s grant proposal “Explorations in Entanglement and Knotting in Low-Dimensional Topology” has been funded to the amount of $294,000 by the National Science Foundation (NFS). NFS funds research and education in the sciences through grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements. 

“This award will support activities that increase mathematical literacy, promote the broad dissemination of knowledge by supporting an online database of knot and link invariants, and will support a lecture series at Virginia Commonwealth University that promotes emerging research topics while emphasizing achievements of underrepresented people,” says Moore.

Moore’s research project is centered on the theory and applications of knots, links, and tangles from the perspective of low-dimensional topology and seeks to advance our understanding of unknotting operations, to uncover new relationships between invariants of links and three-manifolds, and to provide a more robust mathematical framework for the modeling and analysis of enzymatic activities and topological structures of biopolymers.