Dr. Robert J. Whittaker
Dr. Robert J. WhittakerI'm currently a departmental lecturer, working at the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (OCIAM), and a Junior Research Fellow at St. Catherine's College in the University of Oxford.
Previously I spent two years as postdoctoral research assistant at Oxford, and a year as a research fellow at the Centre for Mathematical Medicine and Biology at the University of Nottingham, both working with Sarah Waters. Before that, I was a PhD student in DAMTP at the University of Cambridge, supervised by John Lister.
I have a list of locations and links for journals I often need to consult, and a text file containing various Linux and LaTeX tips. I've also written a few LaTeX packages, which contain various useful commands and macros. For a rather random collection of links, you could have a look at my bookmarks file.
My EPSRC-funded postdoctoral work with Sarah Waters involved doing asymptotic analysis of time-dependent 3D flows in collapsible elastic tubes (think blood flow). Related numerical work, as part of the same project, is being done by Matthias Heil at the University of Manchester. For further details see my collapsible tubes page.
As a result of the study-group problem Optimisation of fluid distribution inside a porous construct, I have done some work modelling the fluid flow and nutrient transport inside tissue engineering bioreactors.
I also have a more recent interest in flow in curved tubes, and have co-supervised a summer student looking theoretically at how ultra-sound measurements can be used to estimate flow rates in vivo.
For my PhD I looked at various problems of highly viscous thermal convection, with a view to better understanding some of the processes which occur inside the earth. My dissertation was entitled Theoretical Solutions for Convective Flows in Geophysically Motivated Regimes.
During Part III of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, I wrote an essay (actually more of a literature review) entitled Drips to Drops — Bridging the Gap. It was concerned with pinching singularities in free-surface flows (or in layman's terms, how drops of water are formed from a dripping tap).
I've also had some interesting discussions about how to sink things that were previous floating at in interface with the help of surface tension.
Full list of publications, presentations, etc. …
whittaker@(nospam)maths.ox.ac.ukhttp://robert.mathmos.net/http://robert.mathmos.net/photos/