Nicola Gambino 11 October 2005 Title: Variations on distributive laws Abstract: I will discuss two variations of the well-known equivalence between distributive laws, liftings, extensions, and composite monads. First, I will discuss to what extent this result can be generalized in the context of Ross Street's formal theory of monads. Secondly, I will present an analogous theorem in which one of the two monads is replaced by a Kleisli structure. The talk will end with a survey of the corresponding statements in the two-dimensional setting.