The VIGRE Algebra Group was led by Brian Boe, Leonard Chastkofsky, 
and Daniel Nakano 

The other members of the group are:

Postdocs:

Jonathan Kujawa
Emilie Wiesner

Graduate Students:

Irfan Bagci 
Ben Connell
Bobbe Cooper
Mee Seong Im
Wenjing Li
Kenyon J. Platt
Caroline Wright
Ben Wyser

Undergraduate Student:

Tyler Kelly

The  group continued its investigation of the cohomology of nilpotent
Lie algebras in prime characteristic.

Emilie Wiesner gave a talk early in the semester where she gave some
conditions  which guaranteed extra cohomology in type A. This summarized
and proved some earlier results and conjectures that the
group had. Chastkofsky then gave an introductory talk, aimed at new
members,  summarizing the work that the group had previously done.

Nakano suggested that we take a fresh look at the problem by
developing a new approach to proving Kostant's Theorem, using the
Category O_J and spectral sequence methods. Several talks were given
by veterans of the group to introduce everyone to the ideas
necessary to implement this approach. Bobbe Cooper gave 2 talks,
which included introductory material about the Weyl group
and roots. Jon Kujawa gave a few talks about the representation
theory, cohomology and relative cohomology of Lie algebras. Kenyon
Platt talked about the basics of Category O_J and generalized Verma modules.

Boe then gave a series of talks where he showed that, in outline,
these ideas could indeed be used to give a new proof of Kostant's
Theorem for the complex numbers or in characteristic p, with p large
enough. The proof relied on doing some case by case calculations,
and the group broke into smaller groups to handle these. Some
progress had been made, and it is likely that these calculations will
be completed soon.