My name is Winston Spencer Leslie, but I always go by my middle name, Spencer. I am an Associate Professor at Boston College. I am currently funded by a Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and NSF CAREER grant DMS-2440741 (2025-2030).
During the academic year 2026-2027, I will be at the IAS as a Von Neumann Fellow.
I am interested in representation theory, with emphases in automorphic, p-adic, and geometric representation theory. In particular, I enjoy thinking about:
- Automorphic representations of reductive groups or their covers
- Relative trace formulas and the corresponding local harmonic analysis
- Generalizations of the Hitchin Fibration, orbital integrals, and all that
- Fourier coefficients and Whittaker functions
Before joining the department as faculty, I was a graduate student here at Boston College under the supervision of Solomon Friedberg, graduating in May 2018. Between stints at BC, I was fortunate enough to have Jayce R. Getz as my postdoctoral advisor at Duke University. The idea that there should be a robust theory of endoscopy in the relative setting is really due to Jayce.
Graduate students:
- Siddharth Mahendraker (May 2026), jointly advised with Sol Friedberg, The relative trace formula for the Galois period on SL(2)
- Yuzheng Yan (expected 2028)
If you are a graduate student potentially interested in working with me, please send me an email. I am happy to chat. Even though I am away this next year, I am absolutely available to meet virtually.
Click here for my CV (updated: July 2025)
Here is a photo of my wife and me from our wedding day!
Contact Info
Department of Mathematics, Boston College
Maloney Hall
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
USA
Email: spencer.leslie[at]bc[dot]edu
Office: Maloney 543
Spencer Leslie 