Spencer Nicholas Whitehead

Doctorant, Department of Mathematics, Université Duke | septembre 2022 – Avril 2027

• Currently researching four- and eight-dimensional geometry with Prof. Mark Stern.
• Member of the Certificate in College Teaching program, to be awarded on graduation.

M.Math. in Pure Mathematics (research thesis), Université de Waterloo | Octobre 2021 – août 2022

• Supervisé de Prof. Benoit Charbonneau.
• Titre du thèse: Integrality theorems for symmetric instantons.

B.Math. in Pure Mathematics; Minor in études de l'Asie d'Est, Université de Waterloo | septembre 2016 – août 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.

Stagiaire en ingénierie logicielle, Citadel Enterprise, Janvier 2020 – Avril 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.

Stagiaire en ingénierie logicielle, ContextLogic LLC, Janvier 2018 – Avril 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.

Stagiaire en ingénierie logicielle, Citadel LLC, septembre 2017 – décembre 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, et Spencer Whitehead. "On a smoothness characterization for good moduli spaces." Advances in Mathematics 442 (Avril 2024).
• Charbonneau, B. et 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

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

Selected Teaching Experience

Chargé de cours MATH 106L (Lab calculus 2), août - décembre 2023, Université Duke

• Instruction et coordination d'une classe de 18 élèves.
• Gestion d'un equipe de 4 auxiliaires d'enseignment

Auxiliaire d'enseignment CS 246(E) ([Enriched] Object-Oriented Software Development), septembre 2018 - décembre 2019, Université de Waterloo.

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