I am Head of the Department of Mathemtics and an Applied Mathematician. My main reserach interests are in mechanical models of complex physical, biological and chemical systems and their behaviour. I use a variety of techniques, but concentrate on computational methods to analyse and solve coupled sets of differential equations. My colleague Matthias Heil and I are the co-architects of oomph-lib, a software package containing the techniques that we and many collaborators have developed over the years.

My research interests are in the broad area of continuum mechanics (specifically fluid and solid mechanics and their interaction) with applications to biological and physical systems.

After gaining both a BA and a PhD in Mathematics at The University of Cambridge, I spent two years conducting post-doctoral research in the biomedical engineering center at The Ohio State University. I first came to The University of Manchester as a post-doctoral researcher (2000-2003), was appointed to a lectureship in 2003 and have been here ever since.

I am interested in the use of mathematical models to study biological, physical and chemical  systems. In particular, my research has concentrated on the applications of fluid and solid mechanics  and their interaction to problems in physiology and industry.

 Much of my research has been in collaboration with Prof A. Juel within the Manchester Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics and has involved the design and implementation (with Prof. M. Heil) of oomph-lib: a C++ software library to designed to facilitate the description and solution of multi-physics problems. The libray is based on element-based (finite, spectral, boundary) methods and is under active development.

Current projects include:

• Bifurcation detection and tracking in large-scale problems
• Multiple solutions and instabilities of the interfaces between two fluids
• Calculation of the effective properties of composite materials
• Buckling instabilities of solids with internal structure
• Microscale droplet and liquid spreading over topography