A Mathematician's Journey into the Marvellous World of Microscopic Swimmers & Crawlers - Professor Rachel Bearon
25th January 2020
Rachel Bearon is Professor of Mathematical Biology & Head of Teaching in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. She has extensive experience of developing models bridging spatial and temporal scales to make biological predictions concerning the movement of cells within complex environments. Furthermore, she has significant expertise working directly with experimental biologists to develop novel frameworks for processing and integrating imaging data. Her PhD studying bacterial chemotaxis in biological fluid dynamics (Prof Tim Pedley, University of Cambridge) was followed by postdoctoral research into the spatial-temporal dynamics of motile phytoplankton cells in turbulent environments (working with Prof Danny Grunbaum, University of Washington). From her appointment as Lecturer in 2005 at UoL, she has developed a track record of productive collaborations with biologists. Rachel applies and develops mathematics to study the spatial and temporal dynamics of a wide range of biological systems across multiple scales, ranging from bacterial chemotaxis, cancer cell motility and phytoplankton in turbulence, to modelling cell-signalling pathways, intracellular protein dynamics and drug transport.