High Energy Theory: On the TQFT/VOA correspondence

Topological quantum field theories (TQFTs) offer a rich playground for understanding the structures underlying quantum field theory as a whole. That being said, it is often quite difficult to extract the data of an abstract TQFT from a given physical description. In this talk, I will describe how two-dimensional chiral conformal field theories, and more generally vertex operator algebras (VOAs), aid in this extraction and discuss some recent developments for TQFTs arising from topological twists of supersymmetric gauge theories in three dimensions.