Seminars
I intend to post here pdf versions of recent seminars that I have given.
"Entangled defects and Whitehead products"
IMA Summer School on Topological Methods in Complex Materials, University of Pennsylvania, 25th July-12th August 2011.
A special guest lecture during a summer school on applied topology for graduate students in mathematics. I describe some of the ways in which two or more topological defects in nematic liquid crystals interact and the collective topological properties they exhibit, as well as a brief discussion of why cholesterics may afford greater scope for applications of topology in complex materials.
"Self-diffusiophoresis in the Advection Dominated Regime"
Mathematics and Physics of Soft and Biological Matter, ICTP Trieste, 2nd-13th May 2011.
My work with Andrea Liu on motility due to self-generated concentration gradients. Inspired by biological examples of motility resulting from the polymerisation or depolymerisation of polymeric filaments, we have considered an abstract minimal model for self-diffusiophoresis (the motion of a particle in a self-generated concentration gradient) in the limit of infinte Péclet number where diffusion of the solute is negligible compared to the effects of fluid advection. (This is a version of the same talk that I gave in Oxford on 8th June 2011.) A preprint of our article is also available here.