Dr. Ross Churchley's dissertation, Odd Disjoint Trails and Totally Odd Graph Immersions, contributes to a deeper understanding of graph immersions and related open problems of structural graph theory. His research is related to the Hadwiger conjecture, one of the deepest unsolved problems in graph theory, and his dissertation results have already attracted the attention of top researchers around the world.

His supervisor, Dr. Bojan Mohar, believes this is “one of the best dissertations in Pure Mathematics at SFU in decades” and adds, "it is clear that it will make a lasting impact."

Aside from his stellar academic achievements, Dr. Churchley was an engaged member of the university. Working with the SFU Library, he developed a new LaTex template for graduate students. He also gave professional development workshops on HTML and LaTex, organized learning seminars and weekly tea and coffee socials for the math department, and served in the Math Graduate Caucus and Graduate Student Society Council.

Dr. Churchley has published six papers to date and presented part of his doctoral research at SODA, a highly-ranked conference in discrete math and computer science. He also received several top awards, including an NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canadian Graduate Scholarship, awarded to the top-ranked applicants in science and engineering graduate programs in Canada.

Dr. Churchley now works as a Software Developer at SAP, a market leader in application software.

He says, "Being at SFU gave me many opportunities to learn from world-class researchers and to prepare for a career in industry. I am tremendously grateful for the guidance, support, and encouragement of my supervisor Bojan Mohar, the math department, my wife Leah, and my friends and family."