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 the area.
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.
Andrew Berridge (St. Andrews)
Andrew completed his PhD at the University of St Andrews in 2009, then spent a year at the University of Birmingham as a PhD Plus research fellow before returning to St Andrews as a postdoctoral researcher. His research interests are in strongly correlated systems, in particular itinerant magnetism and phase transitions. He has studied metamagnetism and spatially modulated magnetic states, and recently he has begun investigating non-linear transport near to quantum critical points.
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.
Andrea Floris (Kings College London)
I completed my Ph.D. in 2004 in University of Cagliari (Itaky), with a thesis on DFT for superconductors. After, I moved to Freie Universitaet Berlin, where I spent five years in the DFT group of Prof. Dr. E.K.U. Gross, investigating the electronic, vibrational, and superconducting properties of real materials. In 2009 I spent several months in University of Minnesota (USA), where with Prof. M. Cococcioni, I developed the extension of the DFT+U method to linear response. Since 2010 I am in London, with a project on self-assembly of molecules on metallic surfaces.
Dara McCutcheon (University College London)
Dara is currently a PhD Plus postdoctoral fellow in the London Centre for Nanotechnology (UCL). His interests primarily lie to developing open quantum system techniques valid beyond standard regimes. In particular, he has worked on techniques which account for spatial correlations, high temperatures, and non-equilibrium bath effects. These techniques have been applied to environment induced entanglement, quantum dot, ion trap, and energy transfer systems.
