Meet the people who make up STEM Faculty.
I am currently the university's academic lead for Athena Swan, and Deputy Head of School with a particular interest in supporting the career development of staff.
I have a long standing interest in the issues surrounding women's careers in mathematics and chaired the London Mathematical Society's (LMS) Women in Mathematics Committee from 2006 to 2015. This work was recognized by the award of an OBE in 2015. Details of the work carried out by the LMS to support women's careers can be found here http://www.lms.ac.uk/women-mathematics. I was also a Diversity Champion on the EPSRC Mathematical Sciences SAT. I chaired the School's Athena SWAN self assessment team from 2013 to 2022 - we were awarded a Bronze award in 2014, which was renewed in 2017, and were awarded a Silver award in 2022.
My research is in the area of complex dynamics and concerns the iteration of transcendental meromorphic functions. I am particularly interested in the possible dimensions of the Julia set, the structure of the escaping set and the behaviour of wandering domains.
Together with Professor Phil Rippon, I lead the complex dynamics group at the OU which is part of the rapidly growing dynamical systems group which has a regular seminar series.
The group includes Vasso Evdoridou (Lecturer) together with various PhD students and our activities often include other complex analysts in the department.
Phil Rippon and myself have received several grants from EPSRC, with the most recent funding a project to classify the behaviour in simply connected wandering domains. Together with Vasso, we continue to build on this work in collaboration with Nuria Fagella (University of Barcelona) and Anna Miriam Benini (University of Parma).
We were previously funded by EPSRC to investigate a surprising link that we identified between two open conjectures in complex dynamics: Baker's conjecture and Eremenko's conjecture. The work was funded by two grants which together funded our work for five years (0.5FTE each). More details on the project are given here:
Our former Research Associate, Dave Sixsmith, was funded by the following grant from the EPSRC:
Most of my teaching has been in the area of analysis. I am currently deputy chair for M208 Pure Mathematics and am responsible for the MSc course M835 Fractal Geometry.
