Southeastern regional
mathematical string theory meeting

This is the webpage for the southeastern regional mathematical string theory meeting, held every six months (early April and early October), often at Duke University but occasionally elsewhere.

Next meeting:

The next meeting will be this fall on Saturday November 7, 2026 at Duke University in Durham, NC.

Speakers tentatively include Anthony Ashmore (Skidmore, physics), Elijah Sheridan (Cornell, physics), Weihong Xu (Emory, math).

Tentative schedule:

Friday November 6: Optional informal dinner in Durham, details TBA, at 7:30 pm. (If interested in joining, please contact ES by noon on Thursday November 5.)
Saturday November 7: All talks will be in room TBA.

Accessibility / accomodations:

The organizers of this meeting are committed to building a welcoming and inclusive research environment. We support the non-discrimination statement of the AWM, which can be found here. Any attendee or speaker is welcome to contact any of the organizers directly if he or she feels harassed or excluded.

If you are an individual with a disability and desire an accommodation, please contact Eric Sharpe (VT office phone 540-381-0185) at least 10 business days prior to the event.

Coffee:

There are several coffee shops located close to the Duke physics department:

There are two coffee shops in the Bryan Center.
Another coffee shop, ``Twinnies,'' is located in the Fitzpatrick Center.
Coffee is served in the LSRC cafeteria.
There is a coffee shop in the Perkins Library.

For visitors to the area:

For those flying in, the closest airport is Raleigh-Durham International (RDU).
A map of Duke's campus can be found here.
We will try to obtain parking passes for the lot beside the physics department building, email Eric Sharpe for such a pass if you will drive in.
If you don't have a pass, convenient visitor parking at Duke can often (though not always) be found in the parking deck behind the Bryan Center, off of Science Drive. On rare occasion, that parking deck may be closed or full. In such an event, there is a visitor information center located at the traffic circle on Towerview Road, and the staff there can provide other visitor parking options. (For example, there is a parking deck on Erwin Road, across from the main entrance to the hospital -- but getting from there to the physics department is nontrivial.) Alternatively, see here for a comprehensive list of Duke visitor parking options.
For those driving in from out of town, it should be noted that I-40 typically gets jammed with RTP traffic during morning and afternoon rush hours.

Funding:

We have (limited) funding available to reimburse students and postdocs, both those speaking and those merely attending who, because of distance travelled, need to spend a night in a hotel, courtesy of NSF grant PHY-2014086.
IMPORTANT: If you wish to be reimbursed, see here for the paperwork you will need to provide, and also let Eric Sharpe know that you will wish to be reimbursed.

Previous regional meetings:

An archive of talks at previous meetings is here.

Other upcoming meetings of interest:

A list of upcoming events in VA can be found here.

In addition, the Richmond geometry meeting at Virginia Commonwealth University often has some string and string-adjacent talks.

Raleigh-Durham area attractions:

For those not acquainted with the area, there are a number of things to see. In no particular order, a few include:

Overview of Durham attractions
Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill,
There is a small Museum of NC history on the UNC-CH campus.
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, open late on Thursday evenings,
NC Museum of Art in Raleigh,
NC Museum of Natural Sciences
NC Museum of History
Reader's Corner, a used book store on Hillsborough St. in Raleigh,
Nice Price Books, another used book store on Hillsborough St. in Raleigh,
Other Raleigh events held on the first Friday of every month are listed here,
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, held in April of each year.
Events in Chapel Hill are often listed here.

Southeastern regional mathematical string theory meeting