Oxford DPhils win accolades at Osborne Reynolds Day

The Osborne Reynolds Day, hosted by the University of Manchester, is an annual national event which brings together researchers from academia and industry working in the broad field of fluid dynamics to showcase the latest research, innovation and development in this broad discipline.

As part of this the Osborne Reynolds PhD competition offers prestigious awards that celebrate the quality of students and graduates pursuing doctoral level research across the broad domain of fluid mechanics. This year there were eight finalists from 27 entries from the hundreds of fluid mechanics PhDs submitted in the last year.

The overall winner was Oxford Engineering Science student Thomas Monahan, whose thesis was supervised by Professors Tom Adcock and Steve Roberts with Dr Tianning Tang (who was a Schmidt AI fellow in Oxford before taking up an academic appointment in Manchester). Thomas’ thesis used machine learning to predict ocean water levels and currents. His work is already having impact beyond academia as it has started to be used for operational storm surge forecasting. He authored a recent paper in Nature Communications on satellite observations of a tsunami induced seiche which received worldwide media coverage. Thomas is continuing his work in the department as a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow and will take up a Junior Research Fellowship at New College in October.

Joint runner up was Engineering DPhil student Kaitao (David) Tang. His thesis was supervised by Professors Wouter Moster and Tom Adcock. Kaitao’s thesis used computer simulations to understand the behaviour of small fluid droplets such as those produced as ocean waves break. He has used the insights from this to derive the first rigorous "sea-spray generation function", something critical for modelling climate change. He recently passed his viva and will continue in the Department as a postdoctoral researcher.

Thomas and Kaitao will now proceed to the European level competition for best fluids PhD organised by ERCOFTAC, which will take place in Germany.