Following undergraduate and Masters’ studies at the universities of Oxford and British Columbia, I spent much of 1997 working on avalanche risk assessment for the Icelandic Meteorological Office. I took up the offer of a NERC-funded Ph.D. in Cambridge in 1997 and obtained my first lecturing position at Leeds in 2000. Having gone part-time at Leeds for child-care reasons from 2007-2010, I moved on to a Prize Senior Lectureship at Sheffield in 2010. In 2016/17 I obtained a Royal Academy of Engineering / Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship that I spent with Charles Meneveau in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins and the Turbulence and Mixing Group in Aeronautics at Imperial College. I joined Loughborough in 2018 as Professor of Fluid Mechanics.

My research interests have evolved over this period from work on snow avalanche dynamics and risk assessment, through fluvial geomorphology to turbulence physics and the development of methods for nonlinear science. The following are specific pieces of work of possible note in approximate chronological order:

  • Development of a statistical risk analysis framework for avalanche hazards;
  • Development of wavelet-based methods for creating synthetic data for hypothesis testing. In particular, the gradual wavelet reconstruction and gradual multifractal reconstruction philosophies;
  • Helped develop an advanced radar for imaging the dynamics of snow avalanches, which is now installed at the Vallée de la Sionne test-site in Switzerland;
  • Proposed the velocity-intermittency quadrant method for obtaining information on flow structures in turbulent flows from single point information;
  • Proposal to analyse the velocity gradient tensor of turbulence having first decomposed it into normal and non-normal parts using a Schur decomposition.

The latter forms the primary focus of my current work. Much of this work has been undertaken in collaboration with some fantastic colleagues from around the world.

Professional affiliations

  • American Geophysical Union

Awards

  • The Tenth Fluid Dynamics Research Prize 2017, awarded by the Japanese Society for Fluid Mechanics

External activities

  • I have been Associate Editor for Water Resources Researchsince 2013.
  • In 2016 I edited a special issue of Fluid Dynamics Research on Interscale Transfers and Flow Topology in Equilibrium and Non-Equilibrium Turbulence.
  • In 2010 I edited a special issue of Progress in Physical Geographyon The Future of Geomorphology.

Key collaborators

My research and enterprise activities are conducted with a range of academic partners, including but by no means limited to:

  • Fluid Mechanics:
    Bharath Ganapathisubramani, Engineering, Southampton; Ivan Marusic, Mechanical Engineering, Melbourne; Joachim Peinke, Physics, Oldenburg; The Turbulence and Mixing Group, Aeronautics, Imperial College. 
  • Geomorphology:
    Efi Foufoula, Civil Engineering, UC Irvine; Stuart Lane, Geosciences, Lausanne; Arvind Singh, Civil Engineering, Central Florida  
  • Hydrodynamics:
    George Constantinescu, Civil Engineering, Iowa; Heidi Nepf, Civil Engineering, MIT; Kouichi Nishimura, Environment, Nagoya.
  • Snow avalanches:
    Massi Barbolini, Hydraulic Engineering, Pavia; Paul Brennan, Electrical Engineering, UCL; Nicolas Eckert, IRSTEA, Grenoble; Jim McElwaine, Planetary Science Institute, Arizona; Betty Sovilla, SLF, Davos.