In my research, I study families of graphs with inherent structure. I am particularly interested in interval graphs and their variants, which can be used to model scheduling problems.  Given a set of meetings, each occurring in a fixed time block (an interval), we can form a graph by assigning a vertex to each meeting and joining two vertices by an edge precisely when the corresponding meetings conflict.  Interval graphs can be used to analyze scheduling conflicts and determine the number of rooms needed to accommodate a set of meetings.

As a researcher, I seek results that characterize which graphs belong to a given structured family and develop algorithms to efficiently determine membership.  Many of the families of graphs I study can also be viewed as partially ordered sets (posets) and I take advantage of this dual perspective in my work.