The London Fluids Colloquium aims to bring together researchers in Fluid Dynamics in London. The Colloquium will take place once a term at a London Institution on a Friday at 2-5pm. Each colloquium will feature short early career researcher talks and one seminar length talk from an invited researcher. There will be refreshments following the talks and an opportunity to discuss and meet other fluids researchers. The series is open to researchers from across London and is free to attend.
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Upcoming colloquium
The next colloquium will be held at UCL, Friday 27th March 2026 2-5pm, including refreshments. For catering purposes, if you plan on attending please enter your name in this form: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/JAi6Zs95Wq.
Seminar speaker: Dominic Vella (Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford) [website]
Title: Drops and bubbles with mobile boundaries: From bendotaxis to the unpoppable bubble
Abstract: The basic physics of a small droplet on a rigid substrate are well known: drops should remain at rest and adopt the form of a spherical cap with contact angle determined by the balance of surface tensions at the contact line. However, when the interface is complex or the boundary is no longer rigid, this picture may change. I will begin by showing how a simple drop can deviate from the spherical cap form if the interface becomes contaminated as it evaporates. This is caused by elastic effects within the interface itself. I will also show that droplets confined by flexible boundaries may spontaneously move. Returning to pure drops of simple fluids, I’ll end by discussing attempts to blow bubbles inside a sessile drop and a surprising means to help the resulting bubbles live apparently indefinitely.
Early career speakers:
Hang Su (Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London)
Xin Guan (Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London)
Location
The colloquium will take place in Harrie Massey Lecture Theatre, 25 Gordon Street.
25 Gordon Street (UCL Mathematics / Students Union) is a short walk from various stations: Euston Square (3 min), Euston (5 min), Warren Street (7 min), Russell Square (13 min).
Harrie Massey Lecture Theatre is on the ground floor. From the main entrance, walk past the shop and lifts to the back of the building and turn left.
Past colloquia
Friday 12th December 2025 at Imperial College London:
| 2:05-2:30pm | Cyan White (Department of Mathematics, UCL), Exact solutions for vortex equilibria by conformal mapping |
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| 2:30-2:55pm | Freya Bull (Department of Mathematics, UCL), Multi-scale modelling of blood rheology in sickle cell disease |
| 3:00-3:50pm | Björn Hof (Institute of Science and Technology Austria), The turbulence problem — the wrong control parameter and one of the Martians |
| 4:00-5:00pm | Discussions over refreshments |
Friday 23rd May 2025 at UCL:
| 2:05-2:30pm | Beth Clarke (Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London), Using structural anisotropy to stabilise asymmetric beating in instability driven filaments |
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| 2:30-2:55pm | Anna Curran (Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London), A theoretical study of the regularisation of stagnant caps of surfactant |
| 3:00-3:50pm | Matthew Juniper (Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge), Information flows: probability, inference, and information in fluid mechanics |
| 4:00-5:00pm | Discussions over refreshments |
Organisers
Edwina Yeo (Department of Mathematics, University College London)
Catherine Kamal (Department of Mathematics, University College London)
Gunnar Peng (Department of Mathematics, University College London)
Ory Schnitzer (Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London)
Eric Keaveny (Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London)
Sponsors
We gratefully acknowledge support from the EPSRC National Fellowships in Fluid Dynamics scheme (Grant number EP/X027902/1) and the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London.