Conference: 21st Annual Graduate Student Combinatorics Conference

The 21st Graduate Student Combinatorics Conference (GSCC) will be held at the University of Illinois Chicago on March 27-29, 2026. The conference will support and benefit graduate student researchers in combinatorics working at institutions across the United States of America. There will be plenary talks given by known and highly-regarded researchers in distinct subfields of combinatorics. The rest of the conference will be made up of talks given by graduate students from a broad range of subfields. The conference addresses a critical need for early-career researchers in combinatorics to engage with the broader scientific community, share their findings, and develop presentation skills. Combinatorics is an active and dynamic field whose applications are becoming increasingly important to broader mathematics, computer science, and machine learning. The keynote speakers will include Greta Panova, who studies algebraic combinatorics, having landmark results on the Kronecker and Littlewood--Richardson coefficients, as well as applications in molecular biology and computational complexity theory. The other keynote speaker is Jinyoung Park, who specializes in probabilistic combinatorics and random graph theory, and is known for her proof of the Kahn--Kalai conjecture. The conference will stimulate collaboration and mentoring between graduate students and the senior faculty. The website for the conference is at https://sites.google.com/view/gscc2026/home This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.