Spencer Nicholas Whitehead

Ph.D. candidate, Department of Mathematics, Duke University | September 2022 – April 2027 (expected)

• Currently researching four- and eight-dimensional geometry with Dr. Mark Stern.
• Advanced to candidacy March 2025.
• Member in the Certificate in College Teaching program, to be awarded on graduation.

M.Math. in Pure Mathematics (research thesis), University of Waterloo | October 2021 – August 2022

• Supervised by Dr. Benoit Charbonneau.
• Thesis title: Integrality theorems for symmetric instantons.

B.Math. in Pure Mathematics; Minor in East Asian Studies, University of Waterloo | September 2016 – August 2021

• Recipient of 2021 Alumni Gold Medal for the Faculty of Mathematics.
• Recipient of 2021 Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.

Software Engineering Intern, Citadel Enterprise, January 2020 – April 2020

• Developed C++ data pipelines to parse and archive data streams from Thompson Reuters.
• Handled over 300GB per day of market data at the height of the market impact of COVID-19.

Software Engineering Intern, ContextLogic LLC, January 2018 – April 2018

• Worked as a member of the Platform Data team, monitoring the health of policies and shipping estimates.
• Conducted shipping time estimate experiments ranging from neutral to gross +2.5% profits.
• Created reports and Grafana dashboards combining data from MongoDB and TreasureData tracking merchant policy effectiveness.

Software Engineering Intern, Citadel LLC, September 2017 – December 2017

• Worked on the Accounting Development Team, creating and maintaining software for over 100 clients.
• Designed, tested, and implemented new response formats reducing response size by 10x and increasing speed 5x.

Selected Publications

• Edidin, Dan, Matthew Satriano, and Spencer Whitehead. "On a smoothness characterization for good moduli spaces." Advances in Mathematics 442 (April 2024).
• Charbonneau, B. and Whitehead, S. "Studying Wythoff and Zometool Constructions using Maple." Maple in Mathematics Education and Research (pp. 65–76), 2020.

Supervision

Duke Math+ program (joint with Biji Wong, Gregory Herschlag), Spring 2026

Supervised four undergraduate students in a project on the application of diffusion maps and machine learning to graph partition problems, with a focus on the study of gerrymandering.

MITACS internship program (joint with Benoit Charbonneau), Spring 2022

Supervised two undergraduate students in a computational project on low-dimensional optimal packing problems

Selected Research Presentations

• [Invited] An asymptotic Nahm transform for Spin(7) instantons. Mathematical Congress of the Americas, Miami, July 2025.
• Symmetric instantons. (Poster). Geometric Models of Matter, Leeds, August 2024.
• Generalized Pythagorean lutes. Bridges 2022, Helsinki, August 2022.
• Integrality theorems for symmetric instantons. Union College Mathematics Conference, Schenectady, June 2022.

Selected Teaching Experience

Instructor of record MATH 106L (Lab calculus 2), Fall 2023.

• Served as primary instructor and coordinator for a class of 18 students with daily meetings.
• Managed a team of 4 undergraduate teaching assistants.

Tutorial lecturer CS 246(E) ([Enriched] Object-Oriented Software Development), Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Winter 2019, University of Waterloo.

• Delivered weekly tutorial lectures for classes of 50+ students.
• Designed assignments and managed the course platform for running and evaluating student code.