Title:  Contact structures and knot Floer homology

Abstract:  I plan to discuss a general method for building the minus version of knot Floer homology using sutured Floer homology and contact structures.  I will also show how contact geometric constructions can be used to recover many of the naturally defined maps connecting the various version of Heegaard Floer theory.  Time permitting, I will also discuss generalizations of these techniques to the study of tight contact structures on non-compact 3-manifolds with cylindrical ends.