David Beers

Mathematics Postdoctoral Scholar and Lecturer

I am currently a postdoctoral scholar and lecturer at UCLA researching topological data analysis, supervised by Mason Porter. Before that I was a a DPhil student in the Algebraic Systems Biology group at the University of Oxford, supervised by Heather Harrington and Alain Goriely. My research interests include but are not limited to applications of topology to neuroscience, inverse problems for persistent homology, and the Euler characteristic transform.

You can email me at dbeers at math dot ucla dot edu.

I'm also on Bluesky @davidbeersmath.bsky.social and Twitter @DavidBeersMath, where I have started writing short threads explaining the key ideas behind some of my papers.

Here is my CV, and here is my Google Scholar

Publications

[2025] David Beers and Jacob Leygonie. The fiber of persistent homology for trees. Journal of Applied and Computational Topology (JACT).

[2025] Anna M. Dowbaj, Aleksandra Sljukic, Armin Niksic, Cedric Landerer, Julien Delpierre, Haochen Yang, Aparajita Lahree, Ariane C. Kühn, David Beers, Helen M. Byrne, Sarah Seifert, Heather A. Harrington, Marino Zerial, Meritxell Hutch. Mouse liver assembloids model periportal architecture and biliary fibrosis. Nature .

[2024] Ramón Nartallo-Kaluarachchi, Paul Expert, David Beers, Alexander Strang, Morten L. Kringelbach, Renaud Lambiotte, Alain Goriely. Decomposing force fields as flows on graphs reconstructed from stochastic trajectories. Proceedings of the Third Learning on Graphs Conference (LoG 25).

[2024] Christian Goodbrake, David Beers, Travis B. Thompson, Heather A. Harrington, Alain Goriely Brain Chains as Topological Signatures for Alzheimer’s Disease. Journal of Applied and Computational Topology (JACT).

[2023] David Beers, Despoina Goniotaki, Diane P. Hanger, Alain Goriely, Heather A. Harrington. Barcodes distinguish morphology of neuronal tauopathy. Physical Review Research.

[2022] Jacob Leygonie and David Beers. Fiber of Persistent Homology on Morse functions. Journal of Applied and Computational Topology (JACT).

[2019] David Beers and Matt Szczesny. Split Grothendieck rings of rooted trees and skew shapes via monoid representations. Involve .

Preprints

[2025] David Beers and Gillian Grindstaff. Intrinsic Bottleneck Distance for Merge Trees.

[2024] David Beers, Heather A. Harrington, Jacob Leygonie, Uzu Lim, Louis Theran. Fibers of point cloud persistence.

[2023] Lewis Marsh and David Beers. Stability and Inference of the Euler Characteristic Transform.

[2022] David Beers, Alain Goriely, Heather A. Harrington. Stability of topological descriptors for neuronal morphology.

Teaching (UCLA)

Lecturer for Math 132: Complex Analysis for Applications 2022, Fall 2025.

Lecturer for Math 32B: Calculus of Several Variables, Spring 2025.

Lecturer for Math 31B: Integration and Infinite Series, Winter 2025, Fall 2024.

Teaching (Oxford)

Tutor for C3.9 Computational Algebraic Topology, Spring 2024.

Tutor for A2 Metric Spaces and Complex Analysis, Fall 2023.

TA for C3.9 Computational Algebraic Topology, Spring 2022, Spring 2021.

TA for C3.1 Algebraic Topology, Fall 2021, Fall 2020.

TA for B1.2 Nonlinear Systems, Spring 2020.