Applied Maths Seminar 2025-2026
Organisers: Clarice Poon and Ellen Luckins
The Applied Maths Seminars are held on Fridays 12:00-13.00. This year the seminar will be hybrid (at least for Term 1): you can choose to attend in person in room B3.02 or on MS Teams. The team for the seminar is the same as last year, but if you are not a member, you can send a membership request via MS Teams or email the organisers.
Please contact Clarice Poon or Ellen Luckins if you have any speaker suggestions for future terms.
Seminar Etiquette: Here is a set of basic rules for the seminar.
- Please keep your microphone muted throughout the talk. If you want to ask a question, please raise your hand and the seminar organiser will (a) ask you to unmute if you are attending remotely or (b) get the speaker's attention and invite you to ask your question if you are in the room.
- If you are in the room with us, the room microphones capture anything you say very easily, and this is worth keeping in mind ☺️.
- You can choose to keep your camera on or not. Colleagues in the room will be able to see the online audience.
- Please let us know if you would like to meet and/or have lunch with any of the speakers who are coming to visit us so that I can make sure you have a place in the room.
Term 1
| Week | Date | Speaker | Online/F2F | Title |
| 1 | 10 Oct |
Mohit Dalwadi (Oxford) |
F2F |
Emergent phenomena from multiscale heterogeneity: losing symmetry and causing chaos (abstract) |
| 2 | 17 Oct | Marcus Webb (Manchester) | F2F | |
| 3 | 24 Oct | Tristan Lawrie (Exeter) | F2F | |
| 4 | 31 Oct | Audrey Repetti (Heriot-Watt) | F2F | |
| 5 | 07 Nov |
Albane Théry (Warwick) |
F2F | |
| 6 | 14 Nov | Scott McCue (QUT) | F2F | |
| 7 |
21 Nov |
Maciej Buze (Lancaster) | F2F | |
| 8 | 28 Nov | James Griffin (Coventry) | F2F | |
| 9 | 05 Dec | Bernhard Schmitzer (Göttingen) | F2F | |
| 10 | 12 Dec | Daniel Ratliff (Northumbria) | F2F |
Abstracts
Term 1
Week 1. Mohit Dalwadi (Oxford) -- Emergent phenomena from multiscale heterogeneity: losing symmetry and causing chaos
In this talk I use hybrid multiscale techniques to understand emergent phenomena arising in two fundamental problems in fluids and biology.
In the first part, I investigate an overarching question in developmental biology: how are cells able to decode spatio-temporally varying signals into functionally robust patterns in the presence of confounding effects caused by complex heterogeneous environments? This is linked to the general idea first explored by Alan Turing in the 1950s. I present a general theory of pattern formation in the presence of spatio-temporal input variations, and use multiscale mathematics to show how delayed bifurcations (via ‘R-tipping’) can allow biological systems to generate non-standard dynamic robustness for ‘free’ over physiologically relevant timescales. This work also has applications in pattern formation more generally.
In the second part, I investigate how the rapid motion of 3D microswimmers affects their emergent trajectories in viscous shear flow. This can be considered an active version of the classic fluid mechanics result of Jeffery’s orbits for inert spheroids, first explored in the 1920s. I show that the rapid short-scale motion exhibited by many microswimmers can have a significant effect on longer-scale trajectories, despite the common neglect of this motion in some mathematical models. I further demonstrate that fast-scale yawing can generate emergent asymmetry and subsequent chaos, in stark contrast to constant fast-scale rotation.
