Rita Jimenez Rolland, PhD, University of Chicago, 2013, is one of our new Research Instructors this year. Dr. Jimenez Rolland’s researchwork lies at the juncture of geometric topology, representation theory, algebraic topology and geometric group theory. She has applied representation theory to the problem of computing the cohomology of configuration spaces, pure mapping class groups, and classifying spaces of diffeomorphism groups of manifolds. She has also obtained results about the cohomology of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces Mg,n, an active topic of research in algebraic geometry.