I am currently a Maxwell Institute Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. From September 2023 I will be a Flora Philip Research Fellow here, though I will be on leave from that post and visiting Osaka University on a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for most of the academic year 2023–24.
My research has to do with numerical and homological invariants of metric spaces that derive from an interpretation of a metric space as a type of enriched category. More generally, I am interested in enriched category theory and its applications within and beyond pure mathematics.
Since 2020 I have co-organized, with Ruben Van Belle, Edinburgh's Category Theory Seminar.
In 2019–20 I co-organized, with Guy Boyde and Aryan Ghobadi, a meeting for junior researchers called Topics in Category Theory: A Spring School. You can look at the programme of events or the conference photograph.
Various other things I've done or helped to do are listed on my CV.
I haven't always been a mathematician. From 2011 through 2016 I worked as a welfare rights adviser with the Child Poverty Action Group, Drumchapel Money Advice Centre and WestGAP, and from 2005 until 2013 I (also) worked as a producer of music and arts projects with Arika and Tracer Trails. I have an undergraduate degree from the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
I'm interested in talking with non-mathematicians about what mathematics has to do with understanding—and shaping—the social world, and I'm a fan of pedagogical experiments that aim to make such conversations possible. Some experiments that I've been part of are documented on this site.
e-mail: emily (dot) roff (at) ed (dot) ac (dot) uk