Trace ideals can be defined for any module over a ring and have been studied in various contexts. Recently, Herzog, Hibi, and Stamate studied the trace of the canonical module for local Cohen Macaulay rings and showed it can be viewed as a measure of how close the ring is to being Gorenstein. In this talk, I will introduce trace ideals and discuss recent results on the trace of the canonical module for rings in which we can exploit some combinatorial data, including Hibi rings and some other toric rings. This is joint work with Jürgen Herzog and Fatemeh Mohammadi. Speaker(s): Janet Page (University of Michigan)