EPSRC Fellows
Four new Research Associates have joined the University of Exeter as part of EPSRC’s £300 million in additional funding for mathematical sciences announced by the Government on 27 January 2020.
The University of Exeter is pleased to welcome the following colleagues:
Farzaneh Darki
Multistable perception is the spontaneous alternation between two or more perceptual states that occurs when sensory information is ambiguous. The deterministic and stochastic factors can both influence the timing of perceptual states, as the gradual accumulation of sensory evidence (deterministic) is modulated by sensory and internal noise (stochastic). Conventional models of perceptual competition fail to reproduce the experimentally observed statistics of this phenomenon including the scaling property and the short-tailed skewness of reversal time distributions. This EPSRC-funded project brings a novel approach to address the role of stochasticity in mathematical models of perceptual competitions.
I am a postdoctoral research associate working under the supervision of Dr James Rankin. In my PhD study at University of Exeter I was working on the neural dynamics of perceptual competition. I am interested in neural mechanisms and dynamics that contribute to the perception of ambiguous sensory information. I am using mathematical modelling and tools from bifurcation analysis, together with human perceptual experiments to understand underlying mechanisms of perceptual rivalry across different modalities. My research interests include nonlinear dynamical systems, bifurcation analysis, mathematical and computational modeling, and experiments in perceptual competition.
Kevin Smith
Working on the statistics of families of L-functions away from critical points and lines. In particular families of Dirichlet L-functions.
My main interests are analytic number theory, functional analysis and dynamics, in particular almost-periodic functions.
Douglas Coates
I am currently working in the area of dynamical systems and ergodic theory with a focus on the statistical properties of chaotic maps. I completed my PhD in 2021 at UoE under the supervisor of Dalia Terhesiu and Mark Holland in the topic of limit theorems in the absence of regular variation.
Currently I am interested in problems relating to the existence/non-existence of physical measures and limit theorems for both sums and maxima processes for certain classes of non-uniformly hyperbolic maps.