Dr Nicholas Watkins MInstP

Nick Watkins trained as a theoretical physicist at UCL and Sussex. During his career at the Universities of Sussex and Warwick, and the British Antarctic Survey, his interests evolved from his PhD on time dependent spin Langevin models of decoherence, via experimental space physics, to his current highly interdisciplinary work on complex systems which have included space plasmas, climate and animal foraging. A common thread has been the importance of fluctuations. Informed in part by his own experience, he has become very interested in the role that the diversity in human imagery and memory has played in shaping the history of science, and in particular, the life of Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals. He has recently been a senior visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, and the University of Potsdam. He currently holds visiting professorships in the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series at the LSE and the Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics of the Open University. He is also a visiting fellow at the Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics at Warwick.