Rate My Professor Dominic Searles

Dominic Searles is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Otago. He earned his PhD in 2015 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Alexander Yong, with his doctoral thesis titled "Root-theoretic Young diagrams and Schubert calculus." Prior to this, he completed his Master's thesis, "Initial ideals in exterior algebras," at the University of Auckland in 2009. Before taking up his current position, Searles served as an Assistant Professor (RTPC) in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Southern California. He currently holds the role of councillor on the New Zealand Mathematical Society Council, serving from 2020 to 2026. His early work includes publications such as "On the Number of Facets of Polytopes Representing Comparative Probability Orders" with Ilya Chevyrev and Arkadii Slinko (Order, 2013) and "Root-theoretic Young diagrams and Schubert calculus: planarity and the adjoint varieties" with Alexander Yong (Journal of Algebra, 2016).

Searles' research focuses on the interplay between algebra, geometry, and combinatorics, particularly questions of positivity in algebraic combinatorics. His contributions span Schubert polynomials, slide polynomials, Kohnert tableaux, 0-Hecke modules, quasisymmetric functions, and K-theoretic polynomials. Prominent publications include "Schubert polynomials, slide polynomials, Stanley symmetric functions and quasi-Yamanouchi pipe dreams" with Sami Assaf (Advances in Mathematics, 2017), "Kohnert polynomials" with Sami Assaf (Experimental Mathematics, 2022), "Kohnert tableaux and a lifting of quasi-Schur functions" with Sami Assaf (Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A, 2018), "Polynomial bases: positivity and Schur multiplication" (Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 2020), "Lifting the dual immaculate functions" with Sarah Mason (Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A, 2021), "Polynomials from combinatorial K-theory" with Cara Monical and Oliver Pechenik (Canadian Journal of Mathematics, 2021), and "Diagram supermodules for 0-Hecke–Clifford algebras" (Mathematische Zeitschrift, 2025). In 2020, he was awarded $300,000 from the Marsden Fund to extend combinatorial theories of polynomials, addressing geometry and representation theory problems such as the Schubert problem through new bases and structures.