JAMS Series 2026/27 (Previously SPAAM)
The Junior Applied Mathematics Seminar (JAMS) series will take place every other Wednesday between 4-5pm in room B3.03 and virtually on the JAMS Microsoft Teams ChannelLink opens in a new window during term time. It will host a variety of talks from PhD students involved in applied mathematics research at Warwick and invited guests from other institutions (see below for the schedule and talk abstracts).
If you are interested in speaking, please you the sign-up link here!
The seminars will usually host three speakers (unless otherwise stated) with each talk taking around 15 minutes with 5 minutes of questions afterwards. Speakers and committee members will hang around after the talks for a social visit to Varsity pub and further questions.
This seminar series is hosted by the Warwick SIAM-IMA Student ChapterLink opens in a new window. Please do contact one of the committee members if you would like to join and be added to the MS Teams channel. Note that these talks may be recorded so do join with audio and video off if you don't wish to feature!
If you missed the seminar, head over to our YouTube channelLink opens in a new window to find the recorded talks!
If you would like to give a talk this academic year, please fill out our sign up form, or contact our seminar organiser:
Rob Sunnucks (rob.sunnucks@warwick.ac.uk)
| Date |
Talk 1 |
Talk 2 |
Talk 3 |
| 7th October (Week 1) |
Luca Chadwick |
Jimmy Kornelije Gunnarsson |
Gracie Allen |
| 21st October (Week 3) |
TBD |
TBD |
TBD |
Term 1 Abstracts
Week 1.
Gracie Allen | Statistics | The Sound Underground: Learning About Earthworms with Acoustics
Earthworms are widely considered beneficial ecosystem engineers, but their population trends and influences remain uncertain due to limited historical monitoring data and problems with standard methods. Soil acoustic monitoring is a recently developed non-invasive approach which may address this, but a statistically sound framework for inferring earthworm behaviour and abundance from acoustic recordings remains underdeveloped. I investigate how soil acoustic recordings can be used to build such a framework, using controlled laboratory recordings of known earthworm densities. Signal de-noising and exploratory clustering are used to detect and classify earthworm signals, while discrete state stochastic processes provide a framework to model earthworm activity in both individual and multiple-worm cases. This work establishes a foundation for developing robust acoustic methods for monitoring earthworm populations and assessing changes in soil fauna, which will be scaled beyond the lab and into the field.
Luca Chadwick | Mathematics | Empirical Predictively Oriented Posteriors
Bayesian inference is often designed for parameter estimation, but many applications prioritise predictive performance. Predictively Oriented (PrO) posteriors address this by directly optimising predictive distributions under scoring rules and can offer improved robustness under model misspecification. We introduce a particle-based optimisation approach for computing PrO posteriors through joint gradient descent over posterior distributions and hierarchical hyperparameters. Using a Wasserstein–Euclidean geometry, we derive an interacting particle system that approximates the corresponding gradient flow. We establish theoretical properties including existence and uniqueness of minimisers.
Jimmy Kornelije Gunnarsson | Lund University, Mathematics | Discontinuous Galerkin Weighted Interior Penalty Method with a Provable Discrete Maximum Principle for the Cahn—Hilliard Equations for arbitrary polynomial order
Symmetric Weighted Interior Penalty (SWIP) discretization, was introduced by (Ern et al., 2009) and applied to the Cahn—Hilliard equations in (Gunnarsson & Klöfkorn, 2026a), where a specific weight option was proposed and compared to other schemes which numerically provide evidence of structure preservation. For the newly developed scheme in (Gunnarsson & Klöfkorn, 2026c) a discrete maximum principle and mass conservation is proven, and energy dissipation is observed. In this talk we present recent findings both on the theoretical level and on the numerical level. We further provide some generalizations which follow from coupling via advection -- a similar context was studied in the hp-adaptive case in (Gunnarsson & Klöfkorn, 2026b).
