Office Hours

• I am on sabbatical leave in academic year 2017-18.

Research Interests

I am interested in questions about the large scale geometry and subgroup structure of several families of groups: Artin groups, Coxeter groups, and mapping class groups.  I also study the game of cops and robbers on graphs and related combinatorial games.

Selected Publications

• Bell, Robert W. Combinatorial methods for detecting surface subgroups in right-angled Artin groups. ISRN Algebra 2011, Art. ID 102029, 6 pp.  
• Bell, Robert W.; Margalit, Dan Injections of Artin groups. Comment. Math. Helv. 82 (2007), no. 4, 725–751.  
• Bell, Robert W.; Margalit, Dan Braid groups and the co-Hopfian property. J. Algebra 303 (2006), no. 1, 275–294.  
• Bell, Robert W. Three-dimensional FC Artin groups are CAT(0). Geom. Dedicata 113 (2005), 21–53.   
• Taylor Ball, Robert W. Bell, Jonathan Guzman, Madeleine Hanson-Colvin, and Nickolas Schonscheck. The cop number of generalized Petersen graphs. Discrete Mathematics. Available online, November 2016. Print: Volume 340, Issue 6, June 2017, pp. 1381–1388.  
• Robert W. Bell and Matt Clay. Right-angled Artin groups. Book chapter in Office Hours with a Geometric Group Theorist. Matt Clay and Dan Margalit, editors. Princeton University Press. Available July 2017.  
• Bell, Robert W. & Zeleke, Aklilu. Starting and Sustaining and Undergraduate Research Program: The SURIEM Experience at Michigan State University, PRIMUS, DOI: 10.1080/10511970.2016.1240730.