Prof William J Parnell

Professor of Applied Mathematics and EPSRC fellow

My research falls into the broad area of "continuum mechanics" or more specifically in the areas of solid mechanics, acoustics, elasticity, elastodynamics, homogenization and micromechanics. Applications of this work lie in metamaterials, industrial composites and biological media such as soft tissue and bone. I am also interested more generally in the mathematical modelling of materials, physical processes and industrial problems, and the application and development of novel mathematical methods. My EPSRC Fellowship extension is associated with the design and manufacture of new microstructured materials , including various metamaterials and syntactic foams. This followed on from my EPSRC fellowship "NEMESIS" (2014-19) which was associated with the modelling of soft tissue, metamaterials and industrial composites. At the heart of the project is fundamental, novel applied mathematics.

I am the Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Wave Motion. I am also an Associate Editor for the Quarterly Journal of Mechanics and Applied Mathematics.

I lead the Mathematics of Waves and Materials (MWM) group (formerly WICC) in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. This group was launched in September 2010 with financial support via grants from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, The Leverhulme Trust, The Royal Society and industry. MWM has strong research ties with Dyson and Thales UK, principally in acoustics and materials technology research.

With the help of many across the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Manchester I also launched the Manchester Materials Modelling Centre (M3C) in the summer of 2019.

In 2019 I was delighted to be awarded a Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society.

Alan Turing Building, University of Manchester

Research presentation to Dyson in 2015. Sir James Dyson in the foreground, looking on with great interest!

Here is a talk I gave in December 2020 at the ICMS online Continuum Mechanics Seminar series the focus of which was Neutral Elastic Inclusions

See Chapter 12 of Volume 2 of the World Scientific Handbook of Metamaterials and Plasmonics (book image to the left) by Prof Andrew Norris (Rutgers) and me, focusing on Hyperelastic Cloaking.

Our MWM group meetings occur regularly, see the associated webpage. If you are interested in visiting us and speaking at one of these meetings please email me or Raphael Assier at Raphael.Assier@manchester.ac.uk