Twenty-eighth meeting: Saturday, April 18, 2026

Location: Annenberg Auditorium, Carswell Hall at Wake Forest University
Parking: Participants can park in lots F, G, J, S, and W1.  Lots F and G are very close to Carswell Hall (Building #18 on this map). 
Participants should NOT park in a reserved parking space in any lot as they may get cited.

Confirmed Speakers:
Sarah Brauner (Brown University)
Brendon Rhoades (UCSD)
Sam Spiro (Georgia State University)
Bridget Eileen Tenner (DePaul University)

Tentative Conference Schedule (all times in EST)
(Titles and abstracts are posted below)

09:00 – 10:00am, welcome
10:00 – 11:00am, Bridget E. Tenner
11:00 – 11:30am, coffee break
11:30 – 12:30pm, Sam Spiro
12:30 – 2:30pm, lunch break
02:30 – 3:30pm, Brendon Rhoades
03:30 – 4:00pm, coffee break
04:00 – 5:00pm, Sarah Brauner
5:00 – 5:30pm

Registration and Funding: Please, fill out this form to register for the conference and to request funding. Registration is free and funding is provided by NSF. If you have any questions, feel free to email any of the organizers.
We are asking that participants pre-register, if possible, as it is very helpful for planning our coffee breaks and obtaining funding to support these events.

Poster session: Please, fill out this this form if you are interested in presenting a poster during the conference. The deadline is April 10, 2026.
Note that only junior researchers (students, postdocs, and tenure-track faculty) will present during the conference. Senior faculty should encourage their students and more junior colleagues to apply. For students, the poster they present must be on joint research with their advisor or a more senior researcher, and their name must appear as one of the authors. 

Organizing Committee: Edward Allen (WFU), Kyle Celano (WFU), Sean English (UNC Wilmington), Sarah Mason (WFU), and Clifford Smyth (UNC Greensboro)

Funding provided by NSF

Titles and Abstracts

Sarah Brauner: Dyadic card shuffling 
There are many ways to shuffle a deck of cards. In this talk, I will discuss a strange one introduced by Reiner-Saliola-Welker in 2014 called dyadic shuffling. Many mysteries about this shuffling process have endured, especially related to its eigenvalues. I will present recent progress understanding these eigenvalues using representation theory, thereby proving several conjectures from Nadia Lafrenière’s thesis and partially resolving a question by Reiner, Saliola, and Welker. 
Joint work with Patty Commins, Darij Grinberg, Trevor Karn, Nadia Lafrenière and Franco Saliola

Brendon Rhoades: Matrix loci and shadow play
The Schensted bijection is an explicit one-to-one correspondence between permutations in S_n and ordered pairs (P, Q) of standard Young tableaux with n boxes having the same shape. This bijection plays a fundamental role in many areas of algebraic combinatorics. We describe a new perspective on the Viennot shadow avatar of this bijection arising from the orbit harmonics technique in combinatorial deformation theory.

Sam Spiro: Eulerian Polynomials of Digraphs
One of the classical objects in enumerative combinatorics is the Eulerian polynomial, which is the generating function for the number of descents of a permutation of a given order.  In this talk we explore generalization of these objects for digraphs which were introduced by Foata and Zeilberger.  We focus on studying what can be said regarding $-1$ evaluations of these polynomials, which ends up being related to studying “alternating permutations for graphs” and which partially answers a question of Kalai related to Fourier analysis of boolean functions.  Based on joint work with Kyle Celano and Nicholas Sieger.

Bridget E. Tenner: Permutation Patterns: TNG
Permutations are a classic tool for modeling a variety of scenarios. The study of permutations in their own right, as combinatorial objects, has blossomed in the last half century through a burgeoning interest in permutation patterns. The patterns that a given permutation contains (or avoids) have shown remarkable relevance — and with applications to numerous other fields. We will discuss major themes of that research, as well as exciting and relatively new directions for the field. These directions, sometimes complementary to classical results, have already shown great utility and are poised for even more, suggesting a thrilling new generation of research to come.
Including collaborations with Yosef Berman, Ian Cavey & Hugh Dennin, Joel Lewis, and Kyle Petersen.