In the past few years, conjectures have been made and partial results achieved on unlikely intersections in complex dynamics, following the program initiated by Baker-DeMarco. I will explain their dynamical generalization of the famous André-Oort conjecture on CM points in moduli spaces of abelian varieties. Ghioca, Nguyen, Ye, and myself recently proved the first complete case of this conjecture, for pairs of unicritical polynomials, and I will discuss our result and the connection to invariant subvarieties of $P1 \times P1$, and the structure of the Mandelbrot set.[-]

Combination theorems play an important role in several areas of dynamics, geometry, and group theory. In this talk, we will expound a framework to conformally combine Kleinian (reflection) groups and (anti-)holomorphic rational maps in a single dynamical plane. In the anti-holomorphic setting, such hybrid dynamical systems are generated by Schwarz reflection maps arising from univalent rational maps. A crucial technical ingredient of this study is a recently developed David surgery technique that turns hyperbolic conformal dynamical systems to parabolic ones. We will also mention numerous consequences of this theory, including 1. an explicit dynamical connection between various rational Julia and Kleinian limit sets,2. existence of new classes of welding homeomorphisms and conformally removable Julia/limit sets, and3. failure of topological orbit equivalence rigidity for Fuchsian groups acting on the circle.[-]