Host: Dr Henry McSorley

Venue : Sir Kenneth & Lady Noreen Murray Seminar Room, CTIR 2.84

Bio 

Bill Horsnell joined the CMM in Exeter after 20 successful years of research in immunology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His research interests centre on 1: how our exposure to one type of disease alters our ability to control a different disease and 2: how mothers’ immunity can shape offspring immunity. This work addresses immunity to a range of mucosal infectious (including helminths, bacteria, viruses and fungi) and non-infectious (e.g. allergy) diseases. 

This seminar will address how fundamental changes to mothers’ immunity as a result of pregnancy influence offspring immunity ability to control infection. 

Poor quality infrastructure alongside rapidly corroding handpumps seriously undermine efforts to both raise and sustain access to safe drinking water supplies in sub-Saharan Africa. Building on a decade and a half of learning from trying to raise water well drilling professionalism in Africa, the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) Stop the Rot initiative has been trying to catalyse action to improve handpump quality and mitigate rapid corrosion. This presentation shares experiences from over 20 years of documentation, developing guidelines and animated films and training courses, with a lot now being learned through the convening of a multi-stakeholder action group to stop the rot. This group provides a safe space and accessible exchange platform for those working hands on in the field, together with researchers, implementers, UN organisations and funding agencies. 

The UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Policy & Science will host this event.

This event is both online and in-person. Please contact [email protected] if you wish to join online.

We are excited to announce the dates of the inaugural conference of the research centre, Transformative Change: Educational and Life Transitions (TCELT) and the journal, International Journal of Educational and Life Transitions (IJELT).

This interdisciplinary and cross-sector International Conference on Educational and Life Transitions (ICELT) will be held in Dundee (Scotland) from Thursday 21 to Saturday 23 August 2025!

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Registration is still open!

Please don’t miss the opportunity to participate in this international and interdisciplinary virtual conference.

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We have new and exciting information for you. The most important one is that we are going virtual and there is no registration fee to ensure the conference is fully accessible! 

Visit the ICELT conference website to stay informed of key dates.

During the talk, I will describe my research on host-pathogen interactions during lung infections. Various modelling approaches have been used, including a hybrid multiscale individual-based model that we have developed, which simulates pulmonary infection spread, immune response and treatment within a section of human lung. The model contains discrete agents which model the spatio-temporal interactions (migration, binding, killing etc.) of the pathogen and immune cells. Cytokine and oxygen dynamics are also included, as well as Pharmacokinetic/Pharmacodynamic models, which are incorporated via PDEs. I will also describe ongoing work to develop a continuum model, comparing the spatial dynamics resulting from these different modelling approaches. I will focus in the most part on two infectious diseases: Tuberculosis and COVID-19.

Venue: Fulton G20

In classical continuum mechanics, the interface problems are well established: a two-phase body, a solid undergoing a chemical reaction, contact problems, etc. In this talk, we discuss some of these problem formulations within the context of generalized continuum theory, namely strain gradient elasticity (SGE). In the latter, the elasticity-related length scales parameter is introduced to reflect the microstructural (or substructural in the case of so-called architectured metamaterials) effects at the continuum level, which allows a much more reliable prediction of material behaviour.

Two types of interface problems are covered in this talk. The first one is a coupled mechano-diffusion problem in the framework of SGE and Cahn-Hilliard diffusion models. Such a coupled model can be used for the simulation of diffusion-based coarsening in solder alloys where the microstructure may have a significant contribution to the process of phase separation. Phase evolution and interface kinetics are then simulated using a smooth interface model. The second part of the talk is devoted to contact problems within SGE theory. For both these examples, weak formulations are derived, and numerical results obtained using isogeometric analysis are shown.

Venue: Fulton G20

Time resolved data are a powerful tool to investigate spatial scales of fractions of au, beyond the range of direct imaging. In this talk I will present my study of time variability of accretion-related lines in a sample of young intermediate-mass stars and some of our early results from the North - PHASE Legacy Survey, which investigates stellar variability on timescales from days to years for thousands of young stars.

Venue: Fulton G20

When numerically solving PDEs reformulated as integral equations, so-called layer potentials must be evaluated. The quadrature error associated with a regular quadrature rule for evaluation of such integrals increases rapidly when the evaluation point approaches the surface and the integrand becomes sharply peaked. Error estimates are needed to determine when the accuracy becomes insufficient, and then, a sufficiently accurate special quadrature method needs to be employed.

In this talk, we discuss how to estimate quadrature errors, building up from simple integrals in one dimension to layer potentials over smooth surfaces in three dimensions. We also discuss a new special quadrature technique for axisymmetric surfaces with error control. The underlying technique is so-called interpolatory semi-analytical quadrature in conjunction with a singularity swap technique. Here, adaptive discretisations and parameters are set automatically given an error tolerance, utilising further quadrature and interpolation error estimates derived for this purpose.