Payne’s research focuses on the development and application of combinatorial methods in algebraic geometry, especially through connections to tropical geometry and nonarchimedean analytic spaces.  His recent work uses such techniques to give new insights into the topology of moduli spaces of curves and cohomology of mapping class groups.  Payne received his PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2006, and was a Clay Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University for four years. Prior to joining UT Austin, he was professor of mathematics at Yale University.