Like many, we have had an eventful and challenging second semester and summer in 2019.  The lockdown which began in March has meant adapting to online teaching and home working, with some group members also balancing work commitments with the demands of home schooling.

Here is some of the news from our group during this most unusual time.

Moving on
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Congratulations to Georgia Lynott, who successfully completed her PhD this year! Georgia's viva was conducted online in June, and the group got together virtually to celebrate.  We hope that we can celebrate in person in the near future!  Final year PhD student Marianthi Moschou has also recently submitted her thesis and is awaiting her viva.

Conferences and collaborations
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In January, Raphael Assier spent a very productive week at the Laboratoire de Mécanique et d'Acoustique in Marseille, working on homogenisation with Bruno Lombard and Cédric Bellis.

In February PhD student Erik Garcia Neefjes travelled to Australia where he spoke on "Wave Propagation in Thermo-Visco-Elastic Continua" at KOZWaves and explored waves in other ways, too!  You can read his blog about the trip here.

Publications
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There have been several new publications from the group this year.  An ongoing list of publications can be found here.

A few recent highlights include a new review paper in National Science Review, co-authored by Professor I. David Abrahams, Anastasia Kisil and several others [1].   This review was sparked by discussions at the Isaac Newton Institute’s 2019 research programme, "Bringing pure and applied analysis together via the Wiener-Hopf technique, its generalisations and applications".  Another recent paper from Anastasia, with Matthew Colbrook (DAMPT Cambridge) recently appeared in  Proc. R. Soc. A.: A Mathieu function boundary spectral method for scattering by multiple variable poro-elastic plates, with applications to metamaterials and acoustics [2].

For another recent project, we teamed up with illustrator and comedian, John Cooper, to create short illustrated explainer videos about our research.  You can find them on our YouTube channel, and read about the creative process on our blog, and on John’s.

Looking Forward
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Earlier this year we welcomed Matt Nethercote back to the group! Matt completed his PhD with Raphael Assier last year, and returned for a PostDoc with Anastasia Kisil.  This month we welcomed two new PhD students to the group: Matthew Riding, who has started his PhD with Anastasia Kisil, and Mark Mesbur, who is jointly supervised by Will Parnell and Professor Paola Carbone in the Department of Chemical Engineering.  We look forward to a busy academic year 2020-2021, meeting the challenges of online teaching, and remote-working. 

One of the things researchers often wrestle with is creating clear and succinct explanations of their research for the non-specialist.  It can be extremely helpful to work with others; such as illustrators, teachers and performers, to eliminate jargon and create meaningful outputs that showcase the research.

When we wanted to make a short video about the design of metamaterials for noise reduction devices, we turned to illustrator and comedian John Cooper.

John has worked on projects for the University of Manchester before, creating work for the University’s School Governor Initiative and for the Children’s University of Manchester.  His humorous style lends clarity and informality to a topic.

We started from a blog post about the piece of research in question.  John used it to sketch out an initial storyboard proposal featuring noisy geese!  We then put together an initial script, from which John created a slideshow storyboard.

This project was completed during lockdown, so all our discussions were carried out over email or video conferencing.  Keeping the length of the script to a minimum was challenging, but after several iterations we arrived at the final version, which John narrates.

Here’s what John had to say, ‘I really enjoyed this project. The work the department does is fascinating, and it was an exciting challenge in generating visuals to complement their work on noise reduction.  It's good to learn new things while being creative.’
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Here’s the finished product.  Watch out for those geese!

​One of the most rewarding experiences of my PhD is being able to attend to conferences and the opportunity to introduce myself and present my research to a wide audience of professionals. After two and a half years of PhD studies, I have had the chance to visit some great places within the UK and Europe, and now Australia! KOZWaves is a biennial conference focused on the study wave science and is always held somewhere within Australia and New Zealand. I first heard of it in my PhD first year and thought how amazing it would be to get to know a new community and give a talk at this event. Two years later I was very happy to receive the news that my talk: "Wave Propagation in Thermo-Visco-Elastic Continua" had been accepted to KOZWaves 2020 which was held at the University of Melbourne from the 17-19th of February.
 
The conference exceeded my expectations with great speakers talking from gravitational waves to water waves as well as light, sound and vibrations (to name just a few!) They showcased - the well known fact of - how waves describe so many physical phenomena of the world that surrounds us.

​The next step of the journey was a visit to the University of Adelaide in South Australia which is an 80 minute flight from Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport. As a keen surfer myself, before taking the flight I paid a visit to URBNSURF, a new facility for surfing artificial waves (again waves!) in a big pool right by the airport which was super fun!

I spent three fantastic days at the University of Adelaide visiting Dr. Luke Bennetts. I gave a talk to the Mechanics group on "Modelling Thermo-Viscous Damping in Continua". 

Finally, I visited Dr. Stuart Hawkins at Macquarie University in Sydney and some of his colleagues including Dr. Elena Vynogradova and her PhD student Martin Sagradian. I gave an hour long talk similar to the one I presented in Adelaide and had some interesting conversations. Stuart showed me some very impressive numerical computations via the use of the T-matrix approach for multiple scattering problems.

MWM group had a very active 2019!  Here are some of the highlights from our year.

​In September WICC (Waves in Complex Continua) became MWM (the Mathematics of Waves and Materials).  This new name provides a better fit for the broad and multidisciplinary nature of our research interests.

​We welcomed several new PhD students, postdocs and staff over the course of the year:
 
Studentships:
Eleanor Russel joined us in April to work on Thermal Metamaterials as a Dyson CASE PhD student.  A second Dyson Case student, Thomas White, started in September, working on Swirling Flow in Ducts.  Also in September, Joshua Gillis joined us as a Department funded PhD student (Models of Nonlinear Viscoelasticity for Complex Solids), and Valentin Kunz began a Dean’s Scholarship funded PhD on the application of the theory of multivariable complex analysis to wave diffraction.
 
Post Docs and other staff:
Matthew Curd and Parmesh Gajjar began 6 month postdoctoral positions in January, working on the Experimental Characterisation of Microsphere Composites.  At the end of August we were joined by Naomi Curati, who is working as EPSRC funded Public Engagement Manager.
 
In September, we were privileged to be joined by Anastasia Kisil.  Initially joining as a Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Fellow, Anastasia has now begun a five-year Dorothy Hodgkin fellowship, researching Noise Reduction: Novel Mathematical Techniques for Aeroacoustic Metasurfaces.

In early 2019, Will Parnell received an £897K extension to his current EPSRC Fellowship`NEMESIS’ (New Mathematics for Materials Modelling in the Engineering Sciences and Industrial Sectors).  More information is available here.

We published several papers in 2019, listed here, and are awaiting publication of several more.  In addition, Raphael Assier has edited a special issue of the journal Wave Motion, on canonical scattering, along with David Abrahams.
 
Several conference talks were given:  In June, Will Parnell was invited to speak at the 30th anniversary event of the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.   He also spoke at the International Rubber Conference 2019 and was a plenary speaker at the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE) in November.
 
Raphael Assier was resident at the Isaac Newton Institute (INI) for three weeks in August as part of a programme dedicated to the Wiener-Hopf technique.  Raphael delivered a 5 lecture summer school with Andrey Shanin on multivariable complex analysis at (you can find videos of Raphael's lectures here). 
 
Also at the INI, Anastasia Kisil took part in the 4-month programme, Complex analysis: techniques, applications and computations.  The programme brought together key researchers in the field with a series of workshops and seminars.  A video of Anastasia's seminar is here.

Several of our PhD students were able to attend conferences this year, including first year students Eleanor (Phononics 2019 in Tucson, and IMECE 2019 in Salt Lake City), and Tom (Mat&Flow in Le Mans, and Denorms: Designs for Noise Reducing Materials and Structures training school in Budapest).
 
In October, we hosted a 2-day Workshop on Mechanical and Acoustic Properties of Syntactic Foams, with funding from the EPSRC and UK Acoustics Network. Plenary talks were from Nikhil Gupta (NYU Tandon School of Engineering) and Oscar Lopez-Pamies, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign).

We are looking forward to a busy year full of events and collaborations.  Will Parnell has been invited to speak at the European Conference on Acoustic & Mechanical Metamaterials, and at Syntactic and Composite foams VI.   
Raphael Assier will travel to the Laboratoire de Mécanique et d'Acoustique in Marseille to work on homogenisation with Bruno Lombard and Cédric Bellis.
As a coordinator for the UKAN special interest group for Mathematical Analysis in Acoustics, Anastasia Kisil is looking forward to the Mathematics in Acoustics Conference at Greynog in July.
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2020 is the International Year of Sound, and we are planning events and schools workshops in celebration! For example, in March we will deliver workshops on sound to local secondary schools, and take fun activities that explore the mathematics of sound waves to the Big Bang Fair.  The latest updates on our plans for Sound2020 can be found here.