Project Management

Steering Committee

The purpose of the Steering Committee is:

To provide guidance on the direction of the project to the Programme Committee (comprising of John Ball, Jon Chapman, Endre Suli, Chris Breward and Ruth Loseby);
To provide a regular link with the larger mathematical community, material sciences, engineers, biologists, medics, industry and other associations;
To oversee the interdisciplinary aspects of the project;
To receive reports from the investigators summarising progress over the previous six months and describing research plans for the next six months;
To discuss dissemination and exploitation strategies.

The Steering Committee will meet at least annually, on a day adjacent to one of the OxMOS workshops. A written report will be circulated six months after the last Steering Committee meeting. The report will give progress since the last meeting and plans for the next six months. More regular meetings will be held if considered necessary.

Stefan Müller is chairman of the steering committee and director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, since 1996. His research interests include analysis, continuum mechanics, microstructures and the mathematical aspects of materials science. Stefan Müller’s homepage.

David Allwright, Mathematical Institute, Oxford David Allwright’s homepage.

John Ball is a project co-ordinator of the OxMOS project, and Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford. His main research areas lie in elasticity theory, the calculus of variations, and infinite-dimensional dynamical systems. He established the first global existence theorems for nonlinear elastostatics and developed a rigorous theory of cavitation in solids. With R.D. James (Minneapolis) he proposed and analyzed a mathematical theory of martensitic microstructure based on nonlinear elasticity and the calculus of variations, and analyzed a new mechanism for hysteresis in solids based on geometric incompatibility of parent and product phases. John Ball’s homepage.

Caterina Mora, The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Caterina Mora’s homepage.

Chris Breward is a research facilitator at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford, Deputy Director of OCIAM, and a Stipendiary Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at Christ Church. He is interested in the mathematical modelling of real world phenomena which arise in industry and medicine, in particular fluid flows containing surfactants (Marangoni flows), the evolution of thin liquid films and sheets and the growth of vascular tumours. He is involved in EPSRC Industrial CASE Projects in curtain coating and polymer-surfactant interactions and an EPSRC Mathematics CASE Project in screen printing, and is the coinvestigator on the EPSRC-funded Mathematics in Medicine Study Group series. Chris Breward’s homepage.

Mark Chaplain, Dundee University Mark Chaplain’s homepage.

Jon Chapman is a project co-ordinator of the OxMOS project, and was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics and its Applications at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford, in 1999. As a member of the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (OCIAM) he has been exposed to a wide variety of modelling problems. He is an expert in mathematical modelling and asymptotic analysis, and has contributed to the theory of dislocations, the macroscopic theory of superconductivity, exponential asymptotics, ray theory and the theory of diffraction, and hydrodynamic stability. Jon Chapman’s homepage.

Charlie Elliott, Department of Mathematics, Sussex Charlie Elliott’s homepage.

Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, currently Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology-Chennai before turning to applied mathematics and mechanics at Stanford University, where he obtained his PhD. His work centres around using mathematics to understand the nonlinear and non-equilibrium mechanical behaviour of living and nonliving matter, particularly at the scale of the everyday world and is thus closely tied in with experience and experiments. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan’s homepage.

Alison Noble is a Professor of Engineering Science in the Department of Engineering Science and a Fellow of Wolfson College. She is a Director of the Wolfson Medical Vision Laboratory, a multi-disciplinary research group working in the area of medical imaging and image analysis, a subarea of biomedical engineering. She heads established research activities in cardiac image analysis, cancer image analysis, and image-guided interventions and therapy. She is also developing new research projects in women’s health imaging, and cellular image analysis. Alison Noble’s homepage.

Nik Petrinic is a University Lecturer in Engineering Science and Fellow of Exeter College, University of Oxford. He lectures on topics in Structural Engineering and Solid Mechanics. Dr Petrinic’s current research activities are focused onto integration of experimental and predictive modelling methods in Impact Engineering. Dr Petrinic leads Oxford’s Impact Engineering Team which is currently involved with a number of research projects funded by the EC, EPSRC, DTI and Rolls-Royce plc. Nik Petrinic’s homepage.

Julian Reed, Associate Fellow — Impact Engineering, Rolls-Royce plc

Andrew Stuart is Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick, and director of its Centre for Scientific Computing. His research interests include fitting stochastic differential equations, infinite dimensional sampling, the approximation of stochastic differential equations and algorithms and analysis for models of inertial particles. Andrew Stuart’s homepage.

Endre Süli is a project co-ordinator of the OxMOS project, and Professor of Numerical Analysis at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (Oxford’s Computer Science Department). He has contributed to the theory of finite difference and finite volume approximation of distributional solutions of PDEs, the mathematical analysis of characteristic- and evolution-Galerkin methods for nonlinear conservation laws, h- and hp-adaptive finite element approximation of hyperbolic and mixed elliptic-hyperbolic problems, the numerical analysis of infinite-dimensional dynamical systems, the theory of multiscale, stabilized and discontinuous finite element methods, and the mathematical and numerical analysis of non-Newtonian and polymeric flows. Endre Süli’s homepage.

Angus Wilkinson, Department of Materials, Oxford Angus Wilkinson’s homepage.

John R. Willis is Professor of Theoretical Solid Mechanics at the University of Cambridge, and Visiting Professor of Mathematics at the University of Bath. He is interested in the mathematical investigation of problems arising mostly in the mechanics of solids, including the statics and dynamics of composite materials, dislocation theory, nonlinear fracture mechanics, elastodynamics of crack propagation and ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation. John Willis’s homepage.

Programme Committee

The purpose of the Programme Committee is:

To ensure that the strategic objectives of the OxMOS programme in the areas of mathematical modelling, analysis and numerics are met;
To have responsibility for the administrative and scientific management of the project;
To coordinate finances;
To discuss progress;
To coordinate workshops and conferences;
To coordinate the visitor programme;
To be responsible for the recruitment of postdoctoral researchers and students;
To be responsible for developing a dynamic work plan which maintains the scientific balance of the project as a whole, and evolving it in the light of the appointments made and research developments both within the project and elsewhere;
To monitor and discuss the scientific progress of the programme against this work plan;
To make decisions on the allocation of resources, including stopping existing projects and starting new ones should that satisfy best the strategic objectives of the programme, using the Steering Committee in an advisory role;
To take primary responsibility for initiating new collaborations and research directions, responding to external initiatives and generating further research funding to support the programme in the longer term;
To produce a yearly report on the activities of the group which will be given to the Steering Committee and to the Mathematical Institute’s Research Committee.
To coordinate and encourage the links between the strands of the project.

The Programme Committee will meet formally at least once a month.

Members:

John Ball, Mathematical Institute, Oxford
Chris Breward, Mathematical Institute, Oxford
Jon Chapman, Mathematical Institute, Oxford
Endre Süli, Oxford University Computing Laboratory
Alain Goriely, Mathematical Institute, Oxford
Emma Waters, Mathematical Institute, Oxford

Strategic Objectives

The strategic objectives of the programme are:

To strengthen the mathematical underpinning of modern materials science through the transfer of technology and techniques across areas;
To link up with material scientists, engineers and biologists;
To train a new generation of mathematicians, competent in analysis, modelling and computation, who can effectively interact with scientists from other fields.

To this end a broad programme of interdisciplinary research in solid mechanics will be undertaken, ranging from fundamental analytical issues (including existence, uniqueness, singularities, regularity, stability and bifurcation of solutions, dimensional- and model-reduction, and homogenization) to problems relating to applications and the mathematical modelling of specific materials (such as alloys and bio-materials), including questions associated with the development of new algorithms for the numerical simulation of these, supported by rigorous mathematical theory.

There will be three major interdisciplinary themes:

The formation of patterns of microstructure in alloys
Fracture mechanics
Applications of solid mechanics to medicine.

It is also an objective of the programme to create a research centre in the UK comparable to the leading centres of excellence in the mathematics of materials (including biomaterials) in the US, Europe and New Zealand, which will have a high reputation for bridging advanced mathematical theory and applications.