Industrial and Applied Mathematics Seminar

Katerina is a Reader in Applied Mathematics and the Director for Impact and Engagement at the Cardiff University School of Mathematics. She holds a DPhil from OCIAM, on sonic boom modelling, funded by the AIRBUS and the EU. Katerina has more recently been working on a range of interdisciplinary challenges mainly stemming from biology and medicine, in collaboration with companies, government and society. She is also the founder and coordinator of the European Study Groups with Industry (modelling workshops) in Cyprus (ESGI125, ESGI146). She has also co-founded the non-profit SciCo Cyprus and the Mediterranean Science Festival and she is a TEDx Speaker and a TED-Ed educator. Furthermore, she has been part of large-scale public engagement projects such as the SciShops.eu project where 18 organisations in 12 EU countries tackled pressing societal challenges through co-creative approaches. During the pandemic she led a modelling team that informed policy decisions of the Welsh Government, in collaboration with Prof. Ian Griffiths (OCIAM); she continues working on epidemic preparedness in collaboration with architects and policymakers. She represents the UK in the Councils of the European Consortium of Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) and of EU-Maths-In and she is a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel of the Newton Gateway. She is the recipient of the 2025 IMA Hedy Lamarr Prize for Knowledge Exchange in Mathematics and Its Applications.

Anne Skeldon’s background is in dynamical systems and bifurcation theory. Her early research focused on pattern formation and fluid mechanics, particularly the Faraday wave problem. She later shifted towards applications in biology and sociology, serving as a co-investigator on the six-year complexity-science project Evolution and Resilience of Industrial Ecosystems. She is part of the Mathematics of Life and Social Sciences research group and co-leads the cross-faculty Centre for Mathematical and Computational Biology.

Her current research centres on sleep, circadian rhythms, and data science. She collaborates with researchers at the Surrey Sleep Research Centre to develop and analyse mathematical models of sleep–wake regulation—work that has featured in the UK parliamentary debate, “School should start at 10am because teenagers are too tired.” She has a particular interest in the influence of the light environment on sleep, including the potential effects of permanent daylight saving time, and in the use of mathematical models for fatigue risk management.

Dr Marcelo A. Dias is a Reader in Structural Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. His research spans theoretical structural mechanics, soft condensed matter, and materials modelling. He focuses on understanding how the mechanical behaviour of elastic bodies emerges from the interplay between material composition and carefully designed internal geometry. His work has applications across shape formation in nature, biomechanics, materials and structural mechanics, and the controlled design and functionality of thin plates and shells. You can find some wonderful examples of this research on his research site: https://mazdias.wordpress.com/research/ 

Dr Edwina Yeo is an applied mathematician working at the interface of continuum mechanics and mathematical biology. She specialises in developing mathematical models for biological and biomedical fluid-mechanics processes, with research spanning regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, microbiology and geology. Her recent work includes models of bacterial adhesion in fluid flow, Von Willebrand Factor dynamics in arterial flows, and microscale contaminant behaviour extracted from imaging data.

Her publications appear in journals such as Biomechanics and Modelling in Mechanobiology, Advanced Materials, and Royal Society Interface, alongside recent collaborative preprints. She is currently an EPSRC National Fellow in Fluid Dynamics at UCL and a visiting research fellow in OCIAM.

Dr Finyashu Kaka is a materials scientist specialising in sustainable energy technologies, advanced functional materials, and computational modelling. His work spans organic photovoltaics, solid-state and metal-ion batteries, MXene-based materials, and next-generation thermal barrier coatings. He combines physics-based modelling with machine-learning methods to understand and optimise process–structure–property relationships in energy devices. His research appears in leading journals, and he holds several patents in flexible electronics and energy-efficient thermal systems. He is currently working with Professor Jon Chapman as a postdoctoral researcher in OCIAM.

Dr Rob Van Gorder’s research focuses on how physical phenomena can be described, predicted, and controlled using applied mathematics. He works across mathematical modelling, analytical and asymptotic methods, and numerical simulation, applying this combination to a wide range of physical systems.

His interests in fluid dynamics centre on fundamental flow structures—such as vortices, bubbles, waves, and boundary layers—and how they evolve, persist, or break apart. He also studies spatial instabilities and pattern formation, investigating how mechanisms such as Turing and Benjamin–Feir instabilities extend to heterogeneous or non-autonomous systems arising in chemistry, physics, biology, and epidemiology.

In theoretical physics, Dr Van Gorder works on quantum mechanics, quantum fluids, and nonlinear waves, including the dynamics of Bose–Einstein condensates, quantised vortices in superfluid helium, and confined quantum systems. Across these areas, he aims to understand how nonlinear and quantum systems behave under realistic constraints and external forcing.

His recent publications include work on pattern formation and diffusive instabilities in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Dr Stuart J. Thomson is an applied mathematician whose research sits at the intersection of mathematics, physics, and engineering. He works closely with table-top experiments to uncover how complex fluid and soft-matter systems give rise to novel emergent phenomena through nonlinear dynamics, many-body interactions, and geometric confinement. His interests include interfacial hydrodynamics, self-assembly, active and driven matter, interfacial robotics, transport phenomena, and fluid–structure interaction.

He is currently leading the project “The statistical physics of hydrodynamic random walkers: experiments and theory”, which combines experimental and theoretical approaches to understand how fluid-mediated interactions shape the behaviour of randomly moving microscopic walkers. Dr Thomson is based in the School of Engineering, Mathematics and Technology at the University of Bristol.

Tobias Grafke's research focuses on developing numerical methods and mathematical tools to analyse stochastic systems. His work spans applications in fluid dynamics and turbulence, atmosphere–ocean dynamics, and biological and chemical systems. He studies the pathways and occurrence rates of rare and extreme events in complex realistic systems, develops numerical techniques for their simulation, and quantifies how random perturbations influence long-term system behaviour.