Serte Donderwinkel

I am a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University and I am part of the research group of Prof. Louigi Addario-Berry. I am funded by a CRM-ISM Postdoctoral Fellowship. I completed my PhD at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Christina Goldschmidt, where I was also a Stipendiary Lecturer at St. Hugh's College. In 2024, I will start a tenure track at the University of Groningen in the research group of Prof. Tobias Müller. I will also be affiliated with the CogniGron.

My research is in discrete probability. I mostly study random graphs from various angles, and the common denominator of my projects is that they involve a 'cute' sampling procedure that allows one to study the properties of the random objects as they grow large. Together with my coauthors, I have obtained metric space scaling limits of different families of random (directed) graphs and we have found non-asymptotic tail bounds for various models of random trees, resolving multiple conjectures from the literature. Currently, I am mostly thinking about a fun model for recursive random trees, the large deviations of inhomogeneous random graphs, an enumerative problem related to graphs and the scaling limit of tree-weighted graphs.

CV

Contact: firstname.lastname at mcgill.ca


Research

  1. Random trees have height O(√n), with Louigi Addario-Berry, (2022), 33pp, preprint

  2. A new proof for Cayley's formula, with Louigi Addario-Berry, Mickaël Maazoun and James Martin (2021), 10pp, preprint

  3. Universality for the directed configuration model: metric space convergence of the strongly connected components at criticality, with Zheneng Xie (2021), 86pp, preprint and video,

  4. Convergence of the height process of supercritical Galton-Watson forests with an application to the configuration model in the critical window (2021), 43pp, preprint

Upcoming events

  1. RandNET seminar, November 22, 2022, Invited talk

  2. 17th Annual Workshop on Probability and Combinatorics, Barbados, April 2023, Invited

  3. Conference on branching processes and applications, Angers, May 2023, Invited talk

Theses

  1. The ant in the labyrinth, written in April 2018 as part of Part iii of the Mathematics Tripos at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Perla Sousi, primarily based on a paper by Noam Berger, Nina Gantert and Yuval Peres

  2. Stein's method applied to preferential attachment graphs, written in June 2016 as part of BSc in Mathematics at the University of Groningen, supervised by Daniel Rodrigues-Valesin and Aernout van Enter, primarily based on a paper by Nathan Ross