Many of the lecture courses are followed up with one or two tutorials. Tutorial questions will be provided by the lecturers, and a crack team of experienced tutors will be on hand to help. Although the main focus of the tutorials will be on the material of the school, you are encouraged to ask your tutors questions about any aspect of physics, your PhD and the range of available leisure activities in Ambleside.
To help you get to know your tutors, they will also be contributing to the series of after-dinner seminars.
This year's tutors
James Adams (University of Surrey)
James Adams is a lecturer at the University of Surrey, in the Soft Condensed Matter group. His research into the properties of liquid crystalline polymer networks where he has modeled the elastic response of smectic elastomer phases, and the flow properties of complex fluids such as polymer solutions. Recent work has focussed an the shear banding instability in polymer solutions during start up shear and large amplitude oscillatory shear.
Sam Carr (Universität Karlsruhe)
Sam is currently a post-doc at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, having previously worked in the University of Birmingham, the International Center for Theretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, and Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state. His research focuses on strongly correlated electron systems, particularly in low-dimensions (for example, carbon nanotubes), and looking at quantum phase transitions between different ground states. He also has a strong interest in dimensional crossover phenomena, when many one-dimensional chains become weakly coupled, both in strongly anisotropic condensed matter systems, or cold atom traps.
Bhavin Khatri (University of Edinburgh)
My research interests are related to applying the theoretical techniques of soft matter and polymer physics to understand fundamental questions in biology. I am currently a postdoc in the soft matter group at the University of Edinburgh, where I am interested in how stochasticity affects the growth of microbial populations. In a previous postdoc in the Soft Condensed Matter Group at the University of Surrey I was interested in emergent behaviour arises in the statistical physics of evolution for simple models of mapping sequences to function in gene regulation. During my PhD in the Polymer and Complex Fluids Group at the University of Leeds, I developed theory to understand the conformational viscoelasticity of single biomolecules and their relation to fluctuations on an underlying energy landscape. Prior to my PhD I worked at Philips Research investigating how antenna architecture and radiowave propagation affect the information theoretic capacity of MIMO (multiple-in-multiple-out) wireless communication channels. I also have an MSc in Communication and Signal Theory and a BSc in Physics, both from Imperial College, London.
Brent Walker (University College London)
Brent is a post-doctoral researcher at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, University College London. His area of research is computer simulations in condensed matter physics, with his current research focusing on applying path integral molecular dynamics to systems containing hydrogen. He has previously used density functional theory techniques to study the structures of liquid metal surfaces and interfaces, and has used time-dependent density functional theory to study the optical properties of semiconductor nanoparticle quantum dots.
