Here's the schedule, and after that, titles and abstracts. 

9:30 - 10:30     Patrick Naylor in DRL A5 

11 - 12             Dan Ketover in DRL A5 

12 - 2               Catered Lunch in DRL 4E17 

2 - 3                 Patrick Naylor in DRL A8 

3:30 - 4:30       Dan Ketover in DRL A8 

4:30 - 5:30       Wine reception in DRL 4E17 

Patrick Naylor 

Title: Doubles of Gluck twists 

Abstract: The Gluck twist of an embedded 2-sphere in the 4-sphere is a 4-manifold that is homeomorphic, but not obviously diffeomorphic to the 4-sphere. Despite considerable study, these homotopy spheres have resisted standardization except in special cases. In this talk, I will discuss some conditions that imply the double of a Gluck twist is standard, i.e., is diffeomorphic to the 4-sphere. This is based on joint work with Dave Gabai and Hannah Schwartz. 

In the morning, I’ll give a background talk to introduce some of the main ideas, along with some basic constructions of knotted 2-spheres. 

Dan Ketover 

Title: Stabilizations of Heegaard splittings and minimal surfaces

Abstract: In the 1930s, Reidemeister and Singer showed that any two Heegaard surfaces in a three-manifold become isotopic after adding sufficiently many trivial handles. I will show how this topological result gives rise to minimal surfaces of Morse index 2 in many ambient geometries.  In particular, applied to most lens spaces we obtain genus 2 minimal surfaces.  I’ll show using this that the number of distinct genus g minimal surfaces in the round sphere tends to infinity as g does (previously the lower bound for all large genera was two).