Date | Day | Time | Week no. | Presenter | Affil. | Dept. Contact | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2026-01-29 | Thursday | 11am | 1 | Eoin O’Brien | Maynooth University | Mehakpreet Singh | Modelling the evolution of a 3D microbubble in a Jeffrey fluid. |
2026-02-10 | Tuesday | 12am | 3 | Finn Box | University of Manchester | Doireann O'Kiely | Poking Plants |
2026-02-26 | Thursday | 11am | 5 | Philip Pearce | University College London | Doireann O'Kiely | Multi-scale modelling of pattern formation in cell populations |
2026-03-12 | Thursday | 11am | 7 | Leah Keating | University of Vermont | James Gleeson | Loops, not groups: Long cycles are responsible for discontinuous phase transitions in higher-order contagions |
2026-03-19 | Thursday | 11am | 8 | Catherine Higgins | University College Dublin | David O'Sullivan | Novel approaches for clustering gene expression profiles in temporal and spatial transcriptomics |
2026-03-26 | Thursday | 11am | 9 | Stuart Thomson | University of Bristol | Doireann O'Kiely | Driven interfacial hydrodynamics, and some physics-informed machine learning |
2026-04-02 | Thursday | 11am | 10 | Cornelius Fritz | Trinity college Dublin | David O'Sullivan | Scalable Durational Event Models: Application to Physical and Digital Interactions |
2026-04-08 | Wednesday | 11am | 11 | Chris Howland | University College Dublin | Doireann O'Kiely | TBC |
2026-04-15 | Wednesday | 11am | 12 | Carl Scarrott | University of Galway | Shirin Moghaddam | TBC |
2026-04-23 | Thursday | 11am | 13 | Andrew Keane | University College Cork | James Gleeson | TBC |
AY 2025-2026 Semester 2 Seminar Schedule
Timetable
Abstracts
As seminar abstracts become available from the speakers this page will be updated.
Seminar week 1 by Eoin O’Brien
Date: 2026-01-29 at 11am
Speaker: Eoin O’Brien (Maynooth University)
Host: Mehakpreet Singh
Title: Modelling the evolution of a 3D microbubble in a Jeffrey fluid.
Abstract: Bubbles often appear in non-Newtonian liquids from nature, engineering, to biomedical applications, such as ultrasonic cleaning, targeted drug delivery and non-destructive medical imaging. However, their study has been under researched compared to their Newtonian counterpart, where the introduction of differing geometries and pressure fields can lead to catastrophic and violent collapse, a phenomenon most widely associated with the destruction of all underwater turbines. In this talk, we introduce the underlying physical and numerical models for three-dimensional bubble mechanics and extend the axisymmetric modelling of Lind and Phillips (Lind and Phillips [2010a,b, 2013]) to investigate the effect of “relaxation time” in a Maxwell and Jeffrey fluid on the evolution of a bubble.
Seminar week 3 by Finn Box
Date: 2026-02-10 at 12am
Speaker: Finn Box (University of Manchester)
Host: Doireann O’Kiely
Title: Poking Plants
Abstract: Plants are natural feats of engineering and botany a playground of physical phenomena. In this talk, we’ll take a walk on the wild side and encounter ripe fruit, a gigantic leaf and an explosive cucumber. I’ll describe the bioballistics of seed dispersal, the structural economy of a vasculature network and the cloaking effect of a peel. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that poking a plant is an effective way of testing its mechanical properties.
Seminar week 5 by Philip Pearce
Date: 2026-02-26 at 11am
Speaker: Philip Pearce (University College London)
Host: Doireann O’Kiely
Title: Multi-scale modelling of pattern formation in cell populations
Abstract: I will talk about a few projects in which the behaviour of cells affects self-organisation and/or pattern formation on surfaces. First, I will show how cell-fluid interactions affect surface attachment of swimming bacteria in fluid flow. Then, I will show how cell-cell interactions generate emergent fluid-like material properties in cell aggregates, with implications for pattern formation during chemotactic migration.
Seminar week 7 by Leah Keating
Date: 2026-03-12 at 11am
Speaker: Leah Keating (University of Vermont)
Host: James Gleeson
Title: Loops, not groups: Long cycles are responsible for discontinuous phase transitions in higher-order contagions
Abstract: Discontinuous phase transitions are often observed in the outbreak sizes when we have dynamics on higher-order networks. Here, we consider higher-order networks to be networks with groups. In this talk, we consider complex-contagion dynamics on a network with groups of size two and three. We show that just having groups is insufficient to observe a discontinuous phase transition in the outbreak size, and that longer cycles are required to produce this behaviour. This brings us closer to fully understanding why we sometimes see discontinuous phase transitions in dynamics on higher-order networks where we do not in the dyadic versions of the models.
Seminar week 8 by Catherine Higgins
Date: 2026-03-19 at 11am
Speaker: Catherine Higgins (University College Dublin)
Host: David O’Sullivan
Title: Novel approaches for clustering gene expression profiles in temporal and spatial transcriptomics
Abstract: Functional clustering methods group curves without prior knowledge of the underlying clustering structure. A key challenge is class imbalance,where some clusters are significantly larger than others. This leads to smaller clusters being misclassified into larger clusters, resulting in a poor clustering accuracy. While class imbalance is well-studied in supervised classification, it has received limited attention in unsupervised settings. To address this, we introduce functional iterative hierarchical clustering (funIHC), a novel method for clustering imbalanced one-dimensional functional data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of funIHC against sixteen leading alternatives. We extend this methodology to two-dimensional functional data with spatial transcriptomics IHC (stIHC), focusing on clustering spatially variable genes into modules that reflect shared spatial expression patterns. We demonstrate that stIHC outperforms existing clustering methods in spatial transcriptomics. Gene ontology enrichment analysis confirms that both funIHC and stIHC identify biologically coherent and distinct clusters, demonstrating their utility for meaningful clustering in both time and space.
Speaker’s Paper 1 Speaker’s Paper 2
Seminar week 9 by Stuart Thomson
Date: 2026-03-26 at 11am
Speaker: Stuart Thomson (University of Bristol)
Host: Doireann O’Kiely
Title: Driven interfacial hydrodynamics, and some physics-informed machine learning
Abstract: In this talk I will present a few topics of recent interest that centre around the theme of “driven interfacial hydrodynamics”: fluid mechanical systems in which droplets and particles are self-propelled through interaction with the environment. I will also present some very recent work on using differentiable physics (a branch of physics-informed machine learning) to determine constitutive relations for highly plasticised metals.
Seminar week 10 by Cornelius Fritz
Date: 2026-04-02 at 11am
Speaker: Cornelius Fritz (Trinity college Dublin)
Host: David O’Sullivan
Title: Scalable Durational Event Models: Application to Physical and Digital Interactions
Abstract: Durable interactions are ubiquitous in social network analysis and are increasingly observed with precise time stamps. Phone and video calls, for example, are events to which a specific duration can be assigned. We term data encoding interactions with the start and end times “durational event data”. Recent advances in data collection have enabled the observation of such data over extended periods of time and between large populations of actors. Methodologically, we propose the Durational Event Model, an extension of Relational Event Models that decouples the modeling of event incidence from event duration. Computationally, we derive a fast, memory-efficient, and exact block-coordinate ascent algorithm to facilitate large-scale inference. Theoretical complexity analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate computational superiority of this approach over state-of-the-art methods. We apply the model to physical and digital interactions among college students in Copenhagen. Our empirical findings reveal that past interactions drive physical interactions, whereas digital interactions are influenced predominantly by friendship ties and prior dyadic contact.
Speaker’s Webpage 1 Speaker’s Webpage 2