The fund provides travel and subsistence for a PhD student with exceptional potential to take their research to another university abroad. This funding covers research including conferences, study visits and summer school activities.

2023-2024 awards

Fabio Feser

SUPERVISOR: Dr. Marina Evangelou

"The Doris Chen Mobility Award will help fund a research stay at Stanford University, where I will be working as a visiting researcher in Dr Sabatti's group. Dr Sabatti's group has world-leading expertise in applying high-dimensional statistics to problems in genetics, using novel methods such as SLOPE and Knockoffs. I will be working with the group to incorporate my research into high-dimensional sparse-group models to develop new statistical methods that can help uncover associations between genes and disease outcomes, which will be applied to exciting genetics data that Dr Sabatti's group have access to. The visit will provide a unique opportunity for me to learn from the leading researchers at Stanford and Dr Sabatti's group. I'm grateful to the Doris Chen Mobility award for allowing me to pursue this opportunity, which will finish my PhD on a high".

Jixin Wang

SUPERVISOR: Professor Philip Ernst

Jixin will use the Doris Chen Mobility Award to support his participation in two international conferences organised or co-organised by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in China: the 2024 IMS-China International Conference on Statistics and Probability, taking place from 6 to 8 July, and the Joint Conference on Statistics and Data Science in China, occurring from 12 to 14 July 2024. During this time, he will have the valuable chance to talk and discuss his recent progress and future research direction in one of his PhD projects, "Exact Distributions for Inhomogeneous Diffusions," with top statisticians and probabilists in the IMS community. Participating in both conferences will provide him with insightful feedback on his research conclusions, helping to clarify the following steps and potential applications of his theoretical results in finance and other fields. Moreover, he will have the rare opportunity to engage with globally invited speakers, seeking collaborations in various statistical advancements.

Hugo Chu

SUPERVISORS: Professor Jeroen Lamb and Professor Martin Rasmussen 

Hugo will use the Doris Chen Mobility award to support his attendance at the three-month long program “Computational Dynamics: Analysis, Topology and Data” at the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, Montreal. Throughout this stay, he will be working with some collaborators on projects around random dynamical systems and computer-assisted proofs for partial differential equations. This will also be the opportunity for him to attend several workshops and tutorials on computational dynamics and engage with leading experts in this area of research.

Mohammed Ali Mehmood

SUPERVISORS: Professor Ewelina Zatorska 

"The Doris Chen award will allow me to travel to Paris for a week to begin a new collaboration on a project that aims to derive a partial differential equation that could be used to model physical situations where congestion appears, such as traffic flow or crowd dynamics. Whilst in Paris, I will also have the opportunity to deliver a seminar based on the research I have done during my PhD and obtain feedback from different research groups working in Analysis. I am very grateful for the award because it allows me to explore a new area of research (mathematical modelling with PDEs) and learn from experts in the field, all whilst expanding my network of collaborators."

2016-2017 awards

 

Previous Awards:

2022-2023

Henry Putley

SUPERVISOR: Professor Richard Craster

"The Doris Chen Mobility award will allow me to visit two research groups in Sydney, Australia. Being able to work alongside my Australian collaborators in-person, rather than online at odd hours of the night, will be very beneficial to our joint research. What's more, the chance to present my work to the waves community in Australia is quite exciting and will allow me to make even more connections with UTS and Macquarie University. Hopefully this will lead to more collaborations in the future. I am really grateful for the Doris Chen Mobility award and the opportunities it has afforded me, and this trip is a great way to finish my PhD".

Federico Bertacco

SUPERVISOR: Professor Martin Hairer

Federico will use the Doris Chen Mobility Award to support his research visit at the University of Chicago and to participate in a one-week-long course of the program “Randomness and Geometry” at the Fields Institute in Toronto. Throughout this period, he will have the unique opportunity to exchange ideas with leading experts in the field of random geometry, further advance a collaboration on random planar maps and Liouville quantum gravity, and attend engaging seminars.

Felix Laumann

SUPERVISOR: Professor Mauricio Barahona

"The Doris Chen Mobility award will allow me to participate in the International School and Conference on Network Science (NetSci) in Vienna, Austria, from the 10th to 14th of July 2023. The conference will provide me with the opportunity to listen and speak to many experts in the field of network theory and present my own research on "learning causal dependencies between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through kernel-based independence tests". The conference visit will be valuable to receive important feedback on my PhD research project and shape my future research interests. I am very grateful that the Doris Chen Mobility award will make it possible for me to participate in NetSci 2023".

 

Anna Curran

SUPERVISORS: Professor Darren Crowdy and Professor Demetrios Papageorgiou

Anna will use the Doris Chen Mobility award to help fund her participation in the 10th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), taking place at Waseda University in Tokyo in August 2023. This conference occurs once every four years, and is one of the largest and most important gatherings of applied mathematicians, engineers, and physicists in the world. She has been invited to present her research on the effects of surface diffusion on surfactants in interfacial flows, done in collaboration with Profs Darren Crowdy and Demetrios Papageorgiou, as part of the minisymposium “Physical and Mathematical Research on Transport on Slippery Surfaces”. She will also use the award to fund her attendance at the CISM Summer School “Interfacial Flows: The Power and Beauty of Asymptotic Methods”, taking place in Udine, Italy in June 2023. Both events are of great relevance to her PhD, and will significantly further her research.

 

Marc Nualart Batalla

SUPERVISOR: Dr. Michele Coti Zelati

"The Doris Chen Mobility Award will support my two-week visit to Stony Brook University in New York, USA. This research visit will allow me to collaborate on the study of the stationary Euler equations with prominent figures in the mathematical study of fluid dynamics, as well as showcase and obtain feedback on the research projects I have been working on during the PhD. I am very grateful for the Doris Chen Mobility Award and the opportunities it will give me in this research visit, allowing me to establish collaborations with other professionals in my field.”

Yaozhong Qiu

SUPERVISOR: Professor Boguslaw Zegarlinski

"The Doris Chen Mobility award supported my travel and accommodation for a month-long research visit with a collaborator based in Paris. I was able to significantly further a previous project, thanks to helpful discussions with said collaborator as well as other researchers in the greater Paris area. I also made progress on our existing joint project, and it was a great blessing to be able to work more closely to develop ideas with my collaborator in person. During my stay, I was also able to interact with their research group, meet several other researchers working in adjacent fields, and attend workshops and seminars - there were many exciting ideas for future research projects that have stemmed from this research visit that I hope to develop further. I am very grateful to the support of the award for without which this research visit would not have been possible.”

2016-2017 awards
2021-2022

Victoria Klein

SUPERVISOR: Professor Jeroen Lamb

"The Doris Chen Mobility award has allowed me to spend roughly 3 months learning from and collaborating with researchers at VIS Lab at the Univeristy of Amsterdam. My time at VIS Lab has been invaluable in giving me the ability to collaborate day-to-day with researchers (PhD students and professors) whose interests are aligned with the very particular intersection of mathematics/physics and neural networks, that is the focus of my PhD. My time there has inspired a new paper that I am currently working on with PhD students from VIS Lab, as well as allowed me to further develop skills that play a supporting role in my research but are no less important; high performance computing is an integral part of their lab and has now become a tool that I consistently use in my own research. I hope to continue to collaborate with those at VIS Lab and help solidify concrete links between our research groups in the future. I am very grateful to the Dorris Chen award for allowing me such an opportunity".

Sahil Loomba

SUPERVISOR: Professor Nick Jones

Sahil will use the Doris Chen Mobility Award to finance his participation in the 8th Annual International Conference for Computational Social Science (IC2S2) being held in Chicago, US, in July 2022. He will present his work on sub-national mapping of social inequality indices mediated by social connectivity, inferred from large-scale social network data. His work—which is in collaboration with Prof Nick Jones and Johannes Happenhofer at Imperial, Dr Till Hoffmann at Harvard, and Dr Sumeet Agarwal at IIT Delhi—straddles multiple disciplines and will be of interest to statisticians, data scientists, econometricians, public health experts, and social network analysts—all of whom have a strong presence at IC2S2.

Laura Wakelin

SUPERVISOR: Dr. Steven Sivek

Laura will use this award to help fund a 6 month research trip to the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany. During this time, she will continue her research project on the Dehn surgery characterisation of satellite knots and become involved with the thriving low-dimensional topology community in Bonn. She will give various talks on her research: in particular, she has been invited to speak at the GROW@Bonn conference, which seeks to encourage students from underrepresented genders to pursue a PhD in mathematics.

Athanasios Margaritis

SUPERVISOR: Professor Peter Schmid

Athanasios has used the Doris Chen Mobility Award to partially support his research visit to the 2022 CTR Summer Program, at Stanford University. This biannual summer program is an intensive 4-week workshop and takes place at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University. It is one of the most significant research meetings in the field of complex problems in computational fluid dynamics. Athanasios’ project, in collaboration with Dr. Olaf Marxen, Prof. Peter J. Schmid, Tim Flint, and Prof. Gianluca Iaccarino, has focused on roughness-induced transition in hypersonic fluid dynamics, and the results were presented at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting in November 2022 (75th APS DFD 2022), while it has inspired further collaborations between the groups.

 

Henry Alston

SUPERVISORS: Dr Thibault Bertrand and Professor Andy Parry

"The Doris Chen Mobility Award's generous funding will support my travel and attendance costs for the winter school on "Active Matter in Complex Environments" at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) in Bangalore, India. The focus of the school closely aligns with my research - in brief, I aim to develop frameworks to analyse the physical and thermodynamic properties of active and living systems. What makes this opportunity so special is the location - it is a unique opportunity for me to open up collaborations with researchers based in Indian and other Asian institutions. In establishing a culture of internationally recognised conferences in countries such as India, I am hopeful that the local students will receive equal access to these important academic opportunities".

2020-2021

George Wynne

SUPERVISOR: Dr. Andrew Duncan

 

Louis Sharrock

SUPERVISOR: Dr. Nikolas Kantas 

 

Matteo Tabaro

SUPERVISOR: Professor Sebastian van Strien

 

2016-2017 awards

 

2018-2019

Damián Gvirtz

SUPERVISOR: Professor Alexei N. Skorobogatov

Damián Gvirtz will use his award to finance his participation in the special trimester "Reinventing Rational Points" at the Institut Henri Poincaré, Paris.

The much anticipated programme will grant him the unique opportunity to interact with almost all international researchers in his field, senior and junior, on a daily basis for three months. This includes workshops, lecture series, opportunities to present and disseminate his own PhD results, work on existing collaborations and initiate new ones.

Athanasios Margaritis

SUPERVISOR: Professor Peter J. Schmid 

Athanasios will be using the Doris Chen Mobility Award to fund a short academic visit to the USA in July 2019. During the first part of his stay, he will attend the AFOSR Hypersonic Aerodynamics Portfolio 2019 Meeting in Boulder, Colorado, alongside his supervisor, Prof. Peter Schmid. At this weeklong meeting, they will present their research progress and follow the presentations given by the other members of the Portfolio. During the second part of his stay, he will visit the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. There, he will present his project to the group of Nagi N. Mansour, exchanging ideas and computational approaches for the modelling of non-equilibrium hypersonic flows, as well as work briefly on a short project on the simulation of arc-heated plasma flows. Both visits are expected to be excellent learning opportunities and ignite fruitful collaborations.

So Takao

SUPERVISOR: Professor Darryl Holm

So will use the Doris Chen Award to fund a two-week trip in August 2019 where he will visit Bonn, Germany in the first week to work with his collaborator Dr. D. Alonso-Oran on the regularising effect of Lie-transport noise on the Lagrangian-averaged Boussinesq climate/weather model, and to Toulouse, France in the second week to attend the Geometric Science of Information Conference 2019, where he was invited to present his work (joint with A. Arnaudon and A. Barp) on irreversible HMC sampling on Lie groups. Between the trips, he will also visit his colleague N. Yessirkegenov in Ghent, Belgium to plan a project on SDEs on Lie groups driven by Levy processes. 

Xixi Yu

SUPERVISOR: Professor David van Dyk

Xixi will use the Doris Chen Mobility Awards to support a secondment to Centre for Astrophysics (CfA) | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, in July 2019. She will focus on the collaborated project about incorporating systematic uncertainties into spectral analysis, communicate with both collaborators from both statistics and astronomy backgrounds, obtain comments, suggestions, and new ideas about the current work from a variety of different views. She will speak at the two-day RISE-CHASC Workshop hosted by the Department of Statistics at Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. During the workshop, she will interact with members in the AstroStatistics group, listen to their up-to-date researches, and obtain a deeper understanding in astrostatistics area. Being one of the five finalists for the Best Astrostatistics Student Paper Award, she will present her work in the ASA Astrostatistics Interest Group Topic-contributed session at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) 2019, on the topic of her paper. This is a great opportunity for her to build up connections with other outstanding researchers, share greatest ideas, get exposed to some potential positions after the PhD.

2016-2017 awards
2017-2018
Maximilian Engel

Rosalba Garcia Millan

SUPERVISOR: Dr Gunnar Pruessner

Rosalba has been offered to attend the Complex Systems Summer School 2018 organised by the Santa Fe Institute (New Mexico). The Doris Chen award will allow her to take part this renowned four-week summer school, where she will participate in an intense series of seminars, talks and group projects. She will interact with students and researchers from all around the globe within various fields of expertise. Rosalba will also present her own research at the school.

Jordan

Jordan Hauge

SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR Darren Crowdy 

Jordan will use the Doris Chen Mobility award to finance his three week trip to Anaheim, California in June 2018. During the first part of the stay, he will be attending the SIAM conference on Nonlinear Waves and Coherent structures, where he will be presenting his work (collaborated with Prof. Crowdy) on transform techniques for Diffusion-Wave field theory. The second part will be spent attending the NSF-CBMS Conference on Solving Problems in Multiply-Connected Domains, where his supervisor is principle lecturer. During the NSF-CBMS conference, not only will he be learning about a field he is not familiar with, but he will also be presenting a poster of the work presented at the SIAM conference. As a result of attending both conferences, he hopes to establish new academic relationships with people of different disciplines to aid him in his further education.

Markus

Markus Schmidtchen

SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR Jose Carrillo

Markus will use the Doris Chen Award to fund a research visit to the group of Benoît Perthame at Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions, Sorbonne Université, Paris. He will continue a collaboration on PDEs for models arising in biology initiated in February, 2018. This project is strongly related to his PhD. As a young researcher, the academic visit to Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions will allow Markus to present his research in a different environment and extend and develop his own academic network that will persist after completion of his doctorate studies at Imperial College London. 

Nurgissa

Nurgissa Yessirkegenov

SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR Michael Ruzhansky

The Doris Chen award will enable Nurgissa to visit University of Novi Sad and to attend the International Conference on Generalized Functions GF2018 in August, 2018. It would be an invaluable benefit to him to discuss with the experts the recently introduced notion of the "very weak solution" to the Cauchy problem, allowing one to handle equations with singular propagation speeds.

2016-2017 awards
2016-2017

 

Maximilian Engel

Maximilian Engel

SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR JEROEN LAMB

The Doris Chen Mobility Award enables Maximilian to visit Lai-Sang Young and her research group at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, in September 2017. He will have the opportunity to present his results about shear-induced chaos in random dynamical systems, which has been an important topic in Lai-Sang Young's research, and discuss potential generalisations and new projects with the group. Maximilian also hopes to start new collaborations on related problems in ergodic theory.

Cezary Olszowiec

Cezary Olszowiec

SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR DIMITRY TURAEV

This award will allow Cezary to go for a monthly research visit to CAPA Group at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, at the beginning of 2018. In Uppsala, he will work on the topological methods and computer assisted proofs for the dynamical systems, with applications to game theory, celestial mechanics and neuroscience. Cezary will have the chance to introduce leading experts in these fields to the problems he investigated throughout his PhD studies and which he has already presented at several international conferences.

Thomas Johnson

Thomas Johnson

DR GUSTAV HOLZEGEL

Thomas will use the Doris Chen mobility award to partly fund his attendance to a conference at ETH Zurich celebrating the work of Professor Demetrios Christodoulou. The majority of the award will then be used to fund a visit to the University of Tuebingen with the aim of completing his paper addressing the linear stability of the Schwarzschild solution to gravitational perturbations in the generalised harmonic gauge. There will also be the opportunity to interact with the geometric analysis group there and in particular to consider a collaboration regarding various other notions of stability that one can prove for the Schwarzschild spacetime.

Ruben Tomlin

Ruben Tomlin

SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR DEMETRIOS PAPAGEORGIOU

Ruben has been invited to the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in order to collaborate with Professor André Nachbin. The Doris Chen Mobility Award will cover his travel and a large amount of his expenses for a month long visit in January 2018. This visit will additionally give him the opportunity to present his work and form future collaborations with other mathematicians.

2015-2016
Marina Amado Fereira

Marina Amado Fereira

SUPERVISOR: PROF Pierre Degond

The Doris Chen Mobility Award gives Marina the great opportunity to visit Sebastien Motsch at the Arizona State University in March 2017. During this month they will work on the analysis of an algorithm for nonconvex minimization problems associated to hard-particle systems. This visit may also open doors for new collaborations in the USA.

Marco Marengon

Marco Marengon

SUPERVISOR: DR Dorothy Buck

Marco will use the Doris Chen award to partly cover the expenses of his visit to Princeton University (New Jersey, United States) during the month of November 2016. The visit will be a unique opportunity for him to interact with the local staff and PhD students, present his own research and start collaborations with the world renowned professors and researchers in Topology (and in particular in the field of Heegaard Floer homology) based there.

Thomas Hockenhull

Thomas Hockenhull

SUPERVISOR: DR DOROTHY BUCK

The Doris Chen award will enable Tom to visit Princeton University for three weeks in November of 2016, to work with Peter Ozsváth and other experts in Heegaard Floer homology. He hopes to use it to share his current work with the wide range of relevant researchers which will be present in Princeton during this time, and to elaborate upon and apply his results through collaboration with others.

2014-2015
Akhtar


Mohammad Akhtar

Supervisor: Professor Tom Coates

Mohammad will use the Doris Chen Mobility Award to attend the 2015 Summer Research Institute on Algebraic Geometry, taking place at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City (Utah, United States). He will also attend a week-long preparatory school aimed at graduate students attending this conference. The preparatory school will take place between 6-10 July, 2015, and the main conference will take place between 13-31 July, 2015.

Andrea Fanelli


Andrea
Fanelli

Supervisor: Dr Paolo Cascini

The award will allow Andrea to attend the AMS Summer Institute in Algebraic Geometry for two weeks. This ten-yearly event will be hosted at University of Utah (Salt Lake City, July 2015) and will be an exceptional opportunity to interact with experts in the field. Andrea will will also present a poster about his current research.

Toby Kirk


Toby Kirk

Supervisor: Professor Demetrios Papageorgiou

Toby has been invited to visit Tufts University in the US for a month to continue his collaboration with Professor Marc Hodes and his research group in Mechanical Engineering. The Doris Chen Award will allow him to interact with other members of the group, and gain further experience applying his research in fluid dynamics to practical problems in engineering.

Mehul Makwana


Mehul
Makwana

Supervisor: Professor Richard Craster

Mehul is an invited speaker at the workshop entitled "Emergent Paradigms in Nonlinear Complexity: From PT-symmetry to Nonlinear Dirac Systems, from Polaritons to Skyrmion" which takes place between 8th June-10th June 2015 in Santa Fe (New Mexico). Receiving the Doris Chen Award allows him to extend his visit to a meaningful duration in order to continue his collaboration with Prof Panayotis Kevrekidis (organiser of workshop).

Francesco Patacchini


Francesco Patacchini

Supervisor: Professor Jose Carrillo

Francesco will use the mobility award to travel to the USA in November/December; he will visit Katy Craig at University of California, Santa Barbara and give a talk at a mini-symposium on Nonlocal Interaction Models, which is part of a SIAM Conference on Analysis of Partial Differential Equations held in Scottsdale, Arizona.

2013-2014
Senja Barthel  

Senja Barthel

Supervisor: Dr Dorothy Buck

Invited by Professor Kouki Taniyama to the Mathematics Department in Waseda University, Tokyo. Senja is able to extend this visit as a result of receiving Doris Chen Award funding, allowing her to be significantly more involved in the project and start a collaboration with Prof Taniyama.

Geraldine Bouveret  

Geraldine Bouveret

Supervisor: Dr Jean-Francois Chassagneux

The study visit will take place in Paris from June 9th to June 20th, 2014; Geraldine will visit Professor Bruno Bouchard at CEREMADE (CEntre de REcherche en MAthematiques de la DEcision), Paris-Dauphine University. The title of the PhD project is "Risk Management in Pension Funds: Portfolio Optimisation under a Dynamic Solvency Constraint in Probability".

Judith Ludwig  

Judith Ludwig

Supervisor: Professor Kevin Buzzard

Receiving the Doris Chen award will allow Judith to travel to meet with her collaborators. Furthermore, it will allow her to travel to cutting edge research conferences and discuss new ideas with leading experts in the fields. From June 17th to July 10th Judith plans to visit the University Paris VI, attend a conference on Rigid and Algebraic Geometry at the University of Ulm and a conference on Symmetries and Correspondences in Number Theory at the University of Oxford.

Jorgen Rennemo  

Jorgen Rennemo

Supervisor: Professor Richard Thomas

Jorgen plans to use the Mobility Funding to travel to Korea in July and August to attend three conferences; the ICM satellite meeting "Geometry and Physics of Gauged Linear Sigma Model and Its Related Topics" at KIAS in Seoul, the ICM satellite meeting "Algebraic and Complex Geometry" in Daejeon and the ICM main event in Seoul.

Lukas Schimmer   

Lukas Schimmer

Supervisor: Professor Ari Laptev

Lukas will visit Princeton University as a Visiting Student Research Collaborator (VSRC) from August 1st 2014 to January 31st 2015 to collaberate with Professor Elliott H. Lieb. They will investigate sharp Lieb-Thirring constants.

Fyodor Gainullin  

Fyodor Gainullin

Supervisor: Dr Dorothy Buck

Fyodor has been invited to the University of Texas for both a conference on low-dimentional topology from 4th - 6th April and an extended two week stay to interact wit the world-class 3-manifold topologists there.

Terms and conditions

Important information that you need to be aware of both prior to becoming a student, and during your studies at Imperial College: Terms and conditions