Julia Yeomans

Julia Yeomans
Born	Julia Mary Yeomans (1954-10-15) 15 October 1954
Residence	Oxford
Fields	Soft matter Biophysics Microchannels Non-Newtonian fluids Lattice Boltzmann methods
Institutions	University of Southampton Cornell University University of Oxford
Alma mater	Somerville College, Oxford (BA) Wolfson College, Oxford (PhD)
Thesis	Critical phenomena in disordered systems (1979)
Doctoral advisor	Robin Stinchcombe
Doctoral students	David Haydock Norio Kikuchi Nidhal Sulaiman
Spouse	Peter John Hore
Website www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/people/JuliaYeomans

Julia Mary Yeomans, FRS, FInstP (born 15 October 1954) is a British theoretical physicist and academic. She is active in the fields of soft condensed matter and biological physics. She is Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford.

Education

Yeomans was educated at Manchester High School for Girls, Somerville College, Oxford (where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics in 1976) and Wolfson College, Oxford where she was awarded a DPhil degree in Theoretical Physics in 1979). During her DPhil research, she worked with Robin Stinchcombe on critical phenomena in spin models.

Research

After two years of working as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University with Michael E. Fisher, she was appointed a lecturer at the Department of Physics at the University of Southampton in 1981. In 1983, she moved to the University of Oxford where she became a professor in 2002.

Yeomans is a professor at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics. Her research concentrates in theoretical modeling of processes in complex fluids including liquid crystals, drops on hydrophobic surfaces, microchannels, as well as bacteria.

Yeomans' research is available for a younger audience under the guise of Nature's Raincoats: bio-inspired super water-repellent surfaces. This was first presented for the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2009.

Teaching

Yeomans currently lectures the third year undergraduate course 'Flows, Fluctuations and Complexity' as of Michaelmas term 2015, at the University of Oxford.

She formerly lectured first year 'Complex numbers and ODEs', second year Electromagnetism, and first year calculus. She is well-known for giving out chocolate during lectures for attentive students.

Honours

In 2012, Yeomans was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Research Grant for her research proposal "Microflow in complex environments".

Yeomans was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (FInstP) in 2000. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2013. Her nomination reads:

Julia Yeomans is distinguished for her development of novel numerical and analytical modelling tools to investigate a wide range of complex fluids. New approaches are needed for these materials because the physics covers a wide range of length and time scales, from details of microscopic molecular interactions to collective hydrodynamics. Yeomans' research, which combines her expertise in statistical physics with the power of modern computers, is multifaceted, covering self assembly at molecular and macroscopic levels, drops moving in microchannels and on superhydrophobic surfaces, the rheology of highly non-Newtonian fluids such as liquid crystals, and most recently, interactions between bacterial swimmers.