News

Two co-supervised PhD students in Chemistry start this month: Menna Shirras, on machine learning for the quantum description of uranyl chemistry, and Catherine Needham, on the same for lanthanide and minor actinide chemistry (tentative titles). The studentships come from our successful bid to the Faculty of Science and Technology PhD in Natural Sciences competition, and from a Nuclear Decommissioning Authority PhD bursary with matched funding from the SATURN CDT.

Our new undergraduate programme, the BSc in Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence and Real-world Systems, which I helped develop, welcomes its first students. I am teaching MATH4120: Mathematical Modelling and Programming, a new first-year module designed for it.

Co-organised the inaugural MARS Annual Symposium in Lancaster, 9–11 September, on computational mathematics and probabilistic machine learning.

New preprint with D. P. Bourne, T. Gallouët and Q. Mérigot: Polynomial diagrams for microstructure modelling.

Our paper with F. Birks, I. Ghanem, L. Pastewka and J. Kermode, Resolving structural avalanches in amorphous carbon with arclength continuation, is out in Physical Review Letters.

Organised the workshop Data-driven modelling of metallic materials across scales at Lancaster Castle, 6–8 May, funded by DSAIL and MARS.

Talk at the one-day workshop Interface of Mathematics and ML for Applications in Material Science in Glasgow, organised by Tiffany Vlaar as part of the Network on Mathematical Data Science for Materials Science.

Invited talk at the Warwick Maths and Metals Meeting, a Future Leaders Fellowship finale.

Took part in the Dagstuhl Seminar 25492 on Generalized Voronoi Diagrams and Applications.

Talk at the Applied Mathematics Seminar at the University of Warwick.

Co-organised the ICMS workshop CoMPASs: Computational Materials Science and Mathematics at the Particle and Atomistic Scales in Edinburgh.

Launched, and now run, the MARS Seminar Series, on applied mathematics and the mathematics underpinning AI.

Talk at the joint MARS & Pioneer Centre for AI workshop in Copenhagen.

Welcomed my first Lancaster PhD students, Dawid Lipinski and Inayat Ullah, to MARS.

Teaching this year at Lancaster: MATH115: Geometry and Calculus and MATH400: Statistics in Practice.

Gave a talk and chaired a panel discussion at the MARS launch event in Lancaster.

Appointed Honorary Visiting Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University, in recognition of close research links with its School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences.

Talk at the Third Joint SIAM/CAIMS Annual Meetings in Montréal.

Taught a short course, Generative adversarial networks with applications in microstructure modelling, at the 2025 CMIT Summer Research Internship Programme in Liverpool, 15–18 July.

Talk at the British Mathematical Colloquium & British Applied Mathematics Colloquium in Exeter.

Talk at the Lancaster AI Reading Group.

Talk at the Oberwolfach workshop Singularities in Discrete Systems.

Talk at the Condensed Matter Physics Seminar at Lancaster.

Our paper with J. Braun, Incompleteness of Sinclair-type continuum flexible boundary conditions for atomistic fracture simulations, is out in Multiscale Modeling & Simulation.

Constrained Hellinger–Kantorovich barycenters: least-cost soft and conic multimarginal formulations is out in the SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis.

Started as Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in Mathematics and AI at Lancaster University, in the new MARS group.