I had a great time at Banff and left with several new ideas and a lot of inspiration. One new project has to do with finding ways of using our bordered monopole Floer invariants to compute relative invariants of 4-manifolds with boundary. This was inspired by David Gay's talk on his work with Kirby on trisecting 4-manifolds.

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Every time I come to BIRS I come away with lots of new ideas. This time, though, I had some new ideas that haven't been exposed much to the public and I really appreciated the opportunity to run those ideas by my colleagues in detail. I established at least one new collaboration partnership, with Joan Licata.

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As was the case of each of the prior 3 workshops on "Interactions of gauge theory with contact and symplectic topology in dimensions 3 and 4", the meeting in March of 2013 was truly incredible. I found that the lectures at this workshop were among the best and most relevant to my research that I have seen at a conference in recent memory. I had several inspiring conversations over meals and on mountain hikes, and came away from the workshop full of ideas and mathematically invigorated. This has been my experience with each of the meetings of this biennial workshop, and I very much hope that the workshop will continue in 2015. I think that of all the conferences or workshops of my mathematical career, these meetings have been the most influential to my research.

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This was an excellent meeting, with a good mix of mathematical subjects and participants. For me, it was particularly useful because I met three collaborators from three separate projects, and made progress with each one. One of those collaborators was someone I rarely get to see face-to-face, so it was particularly valuable for us to be able to talk between the lectures and in the evenings.

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