My research concerns the study of continuum mechanics, principally fluid and solid mechanics, with application to biological phenomena. Many complex fluid, solid and fluid-solid interaction problems occur naturally in the human body; for example, the veins in the arm collapse when raised above the level of the heart. Fluid-structure interaction is also important in pathologies of the body. The collapse and occlusion of the airways in the lung is driven by an interplay between the elastic properties of the airway wall and the surface tension of the lung-lining fluid.

I am also generally interested in non-linear phenomena and have been developing methods to determine and track bifurcations of large-scale systems.

Current projects include:

• the development of oomph-lib , an object-oriented library of C++ functions for the numerical solution of multi-physics problems;
• an investigation into the applicability of exact solutions of the Navier--Stokes equations (e.g. stagnation-point flows) in finite domains;
• the simulation of the non-linear evolution of interfacial instabilities;
• the analysis and development of models for nitric oxide (NO) transport in the lungs;
• a study of the motion of rigid and deformable bodies in bounded fluid domains.