Helen Jane Wilson, (born 1973), is a British mathematician and the first female Head of Mathematics at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

(UCL). Her research focuses on the theoretical and numerical modelling of the flow of non-Newtonian fluids such as polymeric materials and particle suspensions.

Early life and education

Wilson was born in

Warrington Warrington () is a town and unparished area in the borough of the same name in the ceremonial county of Cheshire, England, on the banks of the River Mersey. It is east of Liverpool, and west of Manchester. The population in 2019 was estimat ...

. Her father, Leslie Knight Wilson was a chartered accountant; her mother, Brenda (née Naylor) a French teacher. She attended Broomfields Junior School and Bridgewater High School. Wilson studied at

Clare College Clare College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The college was founded in 1326 as University Hall, making it the second-oldest surviving college of the University after Peterhouse. It was refounded ...

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...

, completing a BA, Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics (later converted to an MMath) and PhD in mathematics. Her PhD thesis, titled "Shear Flow Instabilities in Viscoelastic Fluids", was supervised by John Rallison. On graduation she moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she began research on suspension mechanics with Rob Davis in the Chemical Engineering department.

Mathematical work

In 2000 Wilson returned to the UK to take up a lectureship in Applied Mathematics at the University of Leeds. In 2004 she moved to UCL, where she is Professor of Applied Mathematics and as of September 2018, Head of Department. Wilson is the first female to hold the position of Head of Mathematics at UCL.

Research in fluid mechanics

Wilson's PhD thesis and early papers focused on instabilities in

viscoelastic In materials science and continuum mechanics, viscoelasticity is the property of materials that exhibit both viscous and elastic characteristics when undergoing deformation. Viscous materials, like water, resist shear flow and strain linearly ...

fluids. She predicted a new instability in channel flow of a shear-thinning fluid which was later discovered experimentally by another group and on which she still works. She has also worked on instabilities in shear-banding flows and in more complex geometries. Her other major research interest, besides viscoelasticity, is suspension mechanics, and in particular the effect of particle contacts on fluid rheology. Her most recent projects draw these two fields together, investigating the interaction of solid particles with their complex material environment in fields ranging from healthcare to engineering. Her academic publications are listed on the UCL site. One of her best-known publications is the paper "The fluid dynamics of the chocolate fountain", co-authored with Adam Townsend. Unusually for a mathematical paper, this was covered in the Washington Post.

Knowledge transfer

Wilson gave the 2019 Joint London Mathematical Society Annual Lecture on "Toothpaste, custard and chocolate: mathematics gets messy". Problem plastics & how mathematics can help, published in UCL Science and presented at Mathematics Works (Oct 2007). Public lecture: From gases to gloops: Instabilities in fluids in the UCL Lunch Hour Lecture series on 23 February 2016.

Non-technical articles

Case study for the Royal Society on how a supportive employer can support a mother on her return to work. Blog post and BBC World TV news interview commenting on the award of the Fields Medal to a female mathematician for the first time. The

D'Hondt method The D'Hondt method, also called the Jefferson method or the greatest divisors method, is a method for allocating seats in parliaments among federal states, or in party-list proportional representation systems. It belongs to the class of highest ...

Explained: brief explanation of an easier way to understand the allocation of seats at the European elections

Books

Practical Analytical Methods for PDEs in volume 1 of the LTCC Advanced Mathematics series, World Scientific, 2015. In 2016, Wilson co-authored with Dame

Celia Hoyles Dame Celia Mary Hoyles, ( French; born 18 May 1946) is a British mathematician, educationalist and Professor of Mathematics Education at University College London (UCL), in the Institute of Education (IoE). Early life and education Celia Mary F ...

a chapter of the book "Mathematics: How It Shaped Our World"

Recognition

Wilson is an editor of the ''Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics'' and the ''Journal of Engineering Mathematics''. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for ''Physics of Fluids''. She was president (for the 2015–2017 term) of the

British Society of Rheology A British society for those interested in all aspects of rheology. Formed in 1940 by G. W. Scott Blair (Secretary), V. G. W. Harrison, and H. R. Lang as the British Rheologist's Club and changed to its present name in 1950. The inaugural meeting ...

the first woman to hold this position. In 2014 she was a member of the subject panel for Mathematics on ALCAB (the A Level Content Advisory Board), advising on the reforms to A Level Mathematics for first teaching in September 2016. She was a Council Member and is now the Vice-President (Learned Societies) of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

Personal life

She is married with two children.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilson, Helen British mathematicians 1973 births Living people Academics of University College London Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge Academics of the University of Leeds People from Warrington