For the latest exciting PhD opportunities - Visit our webpage at http://www.polymaths-lab.com

Dr Hermes Gadelha was awarded with the "Best of Bristol Lecturer Award" - BoB

Our research focuses on novel questions and unexplained phenomena in a broad range of physical systems found in nature. We are inspired by engineering and mathematical problems found in biology, and the arts. This includes areas such as small-scale fluid mechanics, solid mechanics and elasticity, biological soft-matter, transport phenomena and diffusion, pattern formation and self-organization, and biomimetic devices.

We use a combination of analytical derivations, numerical computations and empirical investigations in areas ranging from animal and human fertilization, swimming of microorganisms, especially human spermatozoa and bacterial swimming, cancer mechanics, molecular-motor dynamics, fluid-structure interactions of intelligent structures, plus synthetic bio-inspired propellers and swimmers.

Other areas include automatic bio-imaging processing and mathematical data analysis, and unorthodox problems in arts and humanities. Interdisciplinarity is thus at the heart of our poly-disciplinary research, and group members will work within a worldwide network which spans an umbrella of universities and industrial partners across 12 countries, from oil and food industry, to fertility clinics and livestock companies.

Our group members also work together towards our public engagement activities in schools, museums and in the media (BBC, Science, The Discovery Channel, The New Scientist and TV interviews) and schools.