Introduction
Julia Mary Yeomans, FRS, FInstP (born 15 October 1954) is a British theoretical physicist and academic. She is active in the fields of soft condensed matter and biological physics. She is Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford.
Early life and education
Yeomans was born on 15 October 1954 in Derby, Derbyshire, England. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, for her BA and at Wolfson College, Oxford, where she was awarded a DPhil degree in Theoretical Physics in 1979). During her DPhil research, she worked with Robin Stinchcombe on critical phenomena in spin models.
Research
After two years of working as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University with Michael E. Fisher, she was appointed a lecturer at the Department of Physics at the University of Southampton in 1981. In 1983, she moved to the University of Oxford where she became a professor in 2002.
Yeomans is a professor at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics. Her research concentrates in theoretical modelling of processes in complex fluids including liquid crystals, drops on hydrophobic surfaces, microchannels, as well as bacteria.
Yeomans' research is available for a younger audience under the guise of Nature's Raincoats: bio-inspired super water-repellent surfaces. This was first presented for the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2009.
Honours
In 2012, Yeomans was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Research Grant for her research proposal "Microflow in complex environments".
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2013. Her nomination reads:
Julia Yeomans is distinguished for her development of novel numerical and analytical modelling tools to investigate a wide range of complex fluids. New approaches are needed for these materials because the physics covers a wide range of length and time scales, from details of microscopic molecular interactions to collective hydrodynamics. Yeomans' research, which combines her expertise in statistical physics with the power of modern computers, is multifaceted, covering self assembly at molecular and macroscopic levels, drops moving in microchannels and on superhydrophobic surfaces, the rheology of highly non-Newtonian fluids such as liquid crystals, and most recently, interactions between bacterial swimmers.