Rate My Professor Cris Negron

Cris Negron is an Associate Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Southern California. He completed his undergraduate work at the University of Virginia and attended graduate school at the University of Washington, where he worked under advisor James Zhang. Negron held postdoctoral positions at Louisiana State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Hausdorff Institute at Bonn, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley. From 2019 to 2021, he served as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina. He joined the University of Southern California as an Assistant Professor in 2021 and was promoted to Associate Professor.

Negron's research lies at the intersections of abstract algebra, representation theory, quantum groups, and mathematical physics. His work explores derived categories of quantum group representations and their connections to topological quantum field theories. He has received the NSF CAREER award (Grant No. DMS-2239698) for his project 'Homotopical representation theory and TQFTs' and is supported by the Simons Collaboration Grant (No. 999367) on 'New Structures in low dimension Topology,' as part of an international team. Negron organizes the Algebra Seminar at USC, covering topics in algebra, representation theory, algebraic geometry, topology, and mathematical physics. His publications appear in leading journals and include 'Hypersurface support for noncommutative complete intersections' (with J. Pevtsova, Nagoya Math. J., 2022), 'Cohomology of finite tensor categories: duality and Drinfeld centers' (with J. Plavnik, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc., 2022), 'Log-modular quantum groups at even roots of unity and the quantum Frobenius I' (Comm. Math. Phys., 2021), 'Support for integrable Hopf algebras via noncommutative hypersurfaces' (with J. Pevtsova, Int. Math. Res. Not., 2021), 'The half-quantum flag variety and representations for small quantum groups' (with J. Pevtsova, Transform. Groups, 2025), 'Quantum SL(2) and logarithmic vertex operator algebras at (p,1)-central charge' (with T. Gannon, J. Eur. Math. Soc., 2024), and 'Cohomology for Drinfeld doubles of some infinitesimal group schemes' (with E. Friedlander, Algebra Number Theory, 2018).