Associate Professor
Associate Chair/Undergraduate Director
Department of Mathematics
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
Email: clayton.shonkwiler@colostate.edu
Office: Weber 206C
Phone: (970)491.1822
Curriculum Vitæ
My primary research interest is in using geometry to understand the world. I use tools from differential, Riemannian, symplectic, and algebraic geometry and the problems I am interested in come from polymer physics, signal processing, and knot theory, among others. Please see the research page for more.
Group
Postdocs
Graduate Students
- Tristan Neighbors (Ph.D. 2026; M.S. 2023)
- Page Wilson (M.S. 2025)
- Joe Geisz
Group Alumni
Postdocs
- Harrison Chapman (2017–2019; now staff software engineer at Google)
Graduate Students
- Anthony Caine (Ph.D. 2024; now assistant teaching professor at Arizona State University)
- Brian Collery (Ph.D. 2024; now founder at Pinpoint Maths)
- Colin Roberts (Ph.D. 2022; now scientific software architect at Xcimer Energy)
- Thomas D. Eddy (M.S. 2019; now data engineer at the New York Times)
Undergraduate Students
- Yekaterina Aimukanova
- Laney Bowden
- Erin Gunn
- Andrea Haynes
- Nikita Lavrenov
- Tucker Manton
- Nikolai Sannikov
- Aaron Shukert
- Gavin Stewart
- Kandin Theis
- Bogdan Vasilchenko
News
- June 2026 “New upper bounds for stick numbers”, by Jason Cantarella, Andrew Rechnitzer, Henrik Schumacher, and Clayton Shonkwiler, published in the Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications.
- May 2026 Tristan Neighbors has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis. Congratulations, Dr. Neighbors!
- May 2026 “Approximately dual and pseudo-dual probabilistic frames”, by Dongwei Chen, Emily J. King, and Clayton Shonkwiler, published in Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis.
- April 2026 Dongwei Chen has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Idaho, to start in Fall 2026. Congratulations, Dongwei!
- April 2026 “Random knotting in very long off-lattice self-avoiding polygons”, by Jason Cantarella, Tetsuo Deguchi, Henrik Schumacher, Clayton Shonkwiler, and Erica Uehara, published in the Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical.
Support
Some of my research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (DMS–2107700) and the Simons Foundation (#354225 and #709150). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.