Mathematical Sciences welcomes new staff

In the last year, the School has welcomed many new academics and research fellows, we look forward to working together in the future.

• Kirsty Bolton joins us from the University of Melbourne, Australia. She was awarded a three year Anne McLaren Fellowship to work with the School and with the Health Protection and Influenza Research Group in the School of Medicine on ‘Exploring the consequences of heterogeneities in mixing and cell mediated immunity for the controllability of pandemic influenza’.

• Roman Cherniha is a Visiting Professor from NASU, Kyiv, Ukraine, supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship. He is working with John King on a project devoted to development and application of symmetry based method for solving nonlinear boundary value problems, especially for problems modelling real processes in engineering, biology and medicine. He has also strong interests in finding Lie and conditional symmetries for nonlinear partial differential equations and development new methods for analytical solving  nonlinear equations, especially reaction-diffusion systems.

• Etienne Farcot has come from Inria, France, where he was a permanent researcher (CR1). He specialises in mathematical modelling of complex biological systems and collaborates with mathematicians and biologists with various specialities, resulting in publications in journals from diverse branches of applied mathematics and biology.

• Matthew Hubbard, from the School of Computing, University of Leeds, joins our Scientific Computation group. His interests lie in the design of computational algorithms for partial differential equations which inherit the essential properties of the underlying mathematical model, and therefore the physical system being approximated. He has applied his work in a variety of fields, including fluid mechanics, meteorology and multiscale modelling in medicine and biology.

• Marco Iglesias joins us from the University of Warwick where he was a postdoctoral research fellow, following a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and three years as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT in the US. His work is in computational inverse problems with applications to the geosciences.

• Matthias Kurzke  has come from the University of Bonn, with expertise in the analysis of variational models for materials science, especially ferromagnets and superconductors. His key interests are in the formation and dynamics of singularities (for example, vortices) in these models.

• Sergey Oblezin joins us from the Alikhanov Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow, Russia. He is an expert in representation theory, mathematical physics and algebraic geometry and will be supported by an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship ‘Topological field theories, Baxter operators and the Langlands programme’. This aims to link the two most influential contemporary research streams in the area, the Langlands programme and the Mirror symmetry, on the basis of new analytic and geometric constructions from string theory, quantum integrable systems and statistical mechanics. 

• Reuben O’Dea  previoulsy from Nottingham Trent University. After completing his PhD with us in 2008 Reuben joined NTU as a lecturer, before returning to our School last year. He works on problems in mathematical medicine and biology, particularly multiscale and multiphase models applied to tissue growth. The emphasis of his research is to understand how the interaction of processes occurring across multiple spatio-temporal scales gives rise to emergent system dynamics.

• Matt Scase previously from the Faculty of Engineering here, where he has worked primarily on buoyancy driven flows, publishing on topics such as explosive volcanology, ocean mixing, internal waves and is also interested in the effects of rotation on flows. He combines theory with experiment, and is part of a field campaign at Santiaguito Volcano, Guatemala, this year as well as experiments using the large superconducting magnets at Nottingham. He was previously a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at Cornell University, NY, and has been the recipient of a number of awards for teaching.

• Thomas Sotiriou joins us from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Italy, an expert in gravity and relativity. He leads a research group funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant entitled ‘Challenging General Relativity’. Thomas’ and his group are researching the limits of General Relativity as a theory for the gravitational interaction: quantum gravity and phenomenology, alternative theories of gravitation, and black holes and compact stars. He has previously held a Marie Curie Fellowship at Cambridge amongst other awards. 

• Fredrik Strömberg  from Durham University joins our Number Theory and Geometry group. He has interests in computational aspects of automorphic forms as well as crossover interests into dynamical systems theory and mathematical physics (quantum chaos and classical Maass waveforms). 

• Kris van der Zee joins us from Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands where he worked as an Assistant Professor in Multiscale Engineering Fluid Dynamics, after having been a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. He has interests in numerical analysis of PDEs, free-boundary problems and uncertainty quantification, with applications to engineering mechanics, biomechanics and mechanobiology. He has been recognised with a ‘Veni’ three year grant for early career researchers in the Netherlands, and has previously held J.T. Oden Visiting Faculty Fellowships at The University of Texas at Austin.

• Yves van Gennip from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the US, is an expert in variational methods in image processing and data analysis. He studies partial differential equations and variational methods, especially where they interact with network based problems. Much inspiration for such problems comes from image processing (denoising, deblurring, segmentation) and data analysis (clustering, classification, topic modelling). He is also interested in energy driven pattern formation.

• Silke Weinfurtner joins us from SISSA -  in Italy, where she was an advanced postdoctoral fellow. She specialises in branch of mathematical physics known as Analogue Quantum Gravity and is supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and a Nottingham Research Fellowship, both entitled ‘Quantum Gravity Laboratory’. More widely her interests include semi-classical and quantum gravity, ultra-cold atoms and quantum information. She has received numerous awards for her work including two Marie Curie grants, and has worked with many luminaries in the field such as Matt Visser and Bill Unruh.