Heights and separation of characters of finite groups

The question of which prime powers can occur as divisors of irreducible character degrees of finite groups has a long history. One related conjecture is given by Geoffrey Robinson in 1996, who conjectured that the p-part of character degrees in a p-block of a finite group can be bounded in terms of the center of a defect group of the block. I will mention recent progress on Robinson's conjecture for odd primes,and then turn to the question of when a p-block of a finite group G is also a q-block of G. A series related work have been done by Navarro-Willems,Bessenrodt-Mall-Olsson, Navarro-Turull-Wolf and etc. The block separation property is studied by Bessenrodt-Zhang and they proved that the nilpotency, p-nilpotency of a finite group can be characterized by intersections of principal blocks of some (quotient) groups. Thus it is natural to ask if the solvability or p-solvability of a finite group can also be characterized in this way. By introducing the so-called block graph of a finite group this problem was solved affirmatively. Finally, I will talk about a conjecture relating the trivial intersection of principal blocks to the existence of nilpotent Hall subgroups.