Lathisms
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Daniel was born into a large family in Bogotá, Colombia, and grew up amongst siblings and cousins in the
high altitudes of the rainy Andean mountains, where there are no seasons to mark the passage of time,
and life is a blurry haze of asados, and novenas, and music, and fútbol. His mother being a relentless
reader and his father a physician who had been very politically active as a young man made a tertulia of
their family evenings. In this ripe environment Daniel’s interests leaned towards music and mathematics.
He decided to give them a go. For better or worse, math stuck, and by 2016 he was finishing a bachelor’s
degree at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Up to this point, it never occurred to him that he could
ever do research in mathematics. The world of Fields medals, the ICM, and fancy journals was as foreign
and surreal as a Greek myth. This started to change after a research experience as an undergraduate at
Purdue University. In la Nacho, as in many public universities in Latin America, campus is as much a
political space as it is a learning one, with the struggles and inequalities of the country on display, boiling
on the surface, and impossible to ignore—quite in contrast with typical US institutions, which are often
isolated in secluded campus towns. When Daniel moved to the States for grad school at Purdue, he could
not shake the feeling of being in a movie set, with the sinking suspicion that one day, when entering a
spotless university building, he would discover it was just cardboard and there was nothing inside, in a
sort of Truman Show. He specialized in algebraic topology and graduated in 2024. He is currently a
postdoctoral researcher in the Max Planck Institute’s Center for Molecular Biology and Genetics and will
be joining Arizona State University as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in 2025.
Daniel is a theoretical mathematician by training who has strong interests in applications and is committed
to the development of applied topology and geometry: his work includes classical areas of algebraic
topology such as algebraic models for loop spaces as well as topological data analysis and its
applications to biology.
He has mentored undergraduate students and was involved with exchange programs that bring
Colombian students to Purdue for research experiences. He also organized the student topology seminar
and is a founding member of Purdue math’s Anti Racist Reading Group, an ongoing organization that
spawned from the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement. He is deeply committed to the
advancement of underrepresented minorities in the mathematical sciences. He strives to implement
teaching practices that are coherent with this commitment and has received several awards in recognition
of his impact as a math educator. Daniel participates and organizes outreach events and conferences
with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“Hispanic Heritage Month is an opportunity to be loud about the parts of ourselves that we often quiet to
blend in. As a researcher, or in the classroom, it is a time to question, shatter, and rebuild the ideas that
we associate with being a scientist.”