About Me

I obtained my Ph.D. under the supervision of Daniel Daigle at the University of Ottawa and am generally interested in problems of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. I am currently a postdoc at the University of Padova. My supervisor is Andriy Regeta. 

My postdoc ends this year (2026), and I am looking for another position (postdoc, visiting researcher, etc...)  If you or someone you know is looking for someone with similar interests, please email me at the email address below. 

Some of the things I'm thinking about now are:

- Automorphism groups of commutative rings and of algebraic varieties

- Locally nilpotent derivations of commutative rings and their associated ring invariants.
- Rationality of families of weighted projective varieties
- Cylinders in Fano varieties

In my spare time, I enjoy rock climbing, golfing, reading and flying.

Email: michael (dot) chitayat (at) unipd (dot) it