Senior Project Manager

As Senior Project Manager for the £7.3M EPSRC Programme Grant MaThRad (Mathematical Theory of Radiation Transport), I work alongside the Principal Investigator to strategically lead and deliver a research programme spanning mathematics, nuclear engineering, and medical physics. Bringing together five leading UK institutions; Warwick, Cambridge, Bath, UCLH, and NPL, our aims are to further the boundaries of what we know about nuclear energy, advanced radiotherapy, and space technologies.

I am passionate about supporting Early Career Researchers and enabling equitable, interdisciplinary research cultures. With a track record of managing high-impact projects across Higher Education, the nonprofit sector, and Public Health, I specialise in building communities of practice that transform ambitious, multi-stakeholder initiatives into measurable outcomes.

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Kathrin Schütrumpf - Events Officer

Kathrin is the Events Officer for the Department of Statistics. Kathrin’s role supports the research strategy of the department with responsibility for an extensive visitor and conference programme. Kathrin supports all MaThRad events from inception to delivery.

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Théophile Bonnet

Théophile is a post-doctoral Research Associate at Cambridge University, and recently obtained his PhD from Université Paris-Saclay. His PhD project focused on correlations in stationary and time-dependent Monte Carlo simulations for neutron transport.

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Chris Dean

Chris is a member of the MaThRad team in Warwick, using his expertise to tackle problems posed by the MaThRad group and their industrial partners. Chris’ research interests include branching structures, growth models, and interacting particle systems.

Chris has a PhD from the University of Bath. 

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Julian Hofstadler

Julian is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Bath working with Alex Cox. His field of research are Monte Carlo methods and how these can be used within the MaThRad project, with particular emphasis on developing a theoretical understanding for these techniques.

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Pedro Martin Chavez

Pedro is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Warwick.

He obtained his PhD from the University of Extremadura, where he focused on the asymptotic theory of branching models, studying the macroscopic and long-term behavior of controlled and spatial processes. 

Before his PhD, he completed an MSc in Mathematics at the University of Extremadura and a BSc in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Seville.

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Poppy Nikou

Poppy is a MaThRad postdoctoral researcher at UCLH. She completed her PhD at the Centre of Medical Imaging Computing (CMIC), UCL. Her research focused on modelling anatomical changes of H&N cancer patients during fractionated radiotherapy treatment. Poppy has broader research interests within radiotherapy, medical imaging and machine learning. Prior to completing her PhD, she did an MPhys in Physics at Manchester Univeristy  and an MRes in medical imaging at UCL.

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Maria Laura Pérez Lara

Maria is a  MaThRad researcher at Warwick. She has previously been working on assessment of alternative radiation therapy methods (proton beam therapy and boron neutron capture therapy) with semiconductor detectors. Maria has broader research interests in data science, medical physics, experimental particle physics and education. She is experienced in X-ray imaging with Medipix detectors, Monte Carlo simulations and data processing.

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Aaron Pim

Aaron joined the MaThRad team in January 2023 and is currently working with Tristan Pryer at the University of Bath on analysing and applying the methods of PDE constrained optimisation to the Boltzmann transport equation, in the context of treatment planning in proton radiation therapy.

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Valeria Raffuzzi

Valeria is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge working on improving Monte Carlo methods for neutron transport. Her research focuses on accelerating Monte Carlo simulations by using variable fidelity cross section representations. Valeria was involved in the development of SCONE (Stochastic Calculator Of the Neutron transport Equation), the University of Cambridge Monte Carlo particle transport code, and continues to contribute to the development of this unique software which is central to the MaThRad programme. 

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Matthew Southerby

Matthew is a MaThRad postdoctoral researcher at UCLH. Matthew completed a PhD in accelerator physics at the University of Lancaster and the Cockcroft Institute concerning the design of a linac booster for proton radiotherapy applications. He did a brief postdoc in accelerator physics, also at Lancaster, before moving to UCLH as a MaThRad postdoc. Prior to completion of his PhD, Matthew completed a Masters in Physics at Bristol University.

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Esmae Woods

Esmae is a post-doctoral research assistant at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD project focused on the development of state reduction techniques for Markov Chains, to help understand dynamical processes within large ill-conditioned systems. Esmae joins the Cambridge team to help further develop SCONE (Stochastic Calculator Of the Neutron transport Equation).

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Prof Victor Rivero

The MaThRad team at Warwick hosted Victor Rivero between July 2023 and August 2024.

Victor is a Mathematician based in the Department of Probability and Statistics in the Center of Research in Mathematics in Guanajuato, Mexico.  He specialises in the theory of Stochastic Processes as well as Renewal Theory, the theory of excursions from a set, and Markov Processes Theory.

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Dr Simon Harris

The MaThRad team at Warwick hosted Simon Harris in September 2025

Simon Harris is an Associate Professor of Probability in the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland, where he also serves as Co-Director of the Discovery Centre of Fundamental Research and Chair of the Probability Group.

Simon is a founding member of ProbL@B, an internationally recognised centre of excellence in probability and branching processes. In 2012–13, he was appointed professeur invité at LPMA, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. His research focuses on probability theory, with expertise in stochastic population models, branching processes, Brownian motion, martingales, and coalescent processes, as well as probabilistic representations of nonlinear PDEs such as Fisher–KPP equations.

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Lucy Bland

Lucy Bland is a PhD student at the Cambridge Nuclear Energy Centre, working on The Random Rays Method, which has recently been demonstrated to hold significant promise with regards to computational efficiency of analysing criticality and shielding problems. Some of the unique features of the method are modest memory requirements and fast convergence on quantities of interest within the computational domain regardless of its size and complexity. These features make the method particularly attractive for modelling multi-physics systems.

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Panagiotis Birmpakos

Panos is a Senior Clinical Scientist at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust and PhD student at the University of Reading. He completed his Master’s in Medical and Radiation Physics at the University of Athens and has ten years of clinical experience in radiotherapy. His PhD research is supervised by Professor Marcus Tindall, Professor Tristan Pryer and Dr. Colin Baker and focuses on derivation of delivered dose of a proton beam via prompt gamma imaging. His interests also include treatment planning optimisation and Monte Carlo methods.

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Alasdair Crossley

Ali is currently completing a PhD in probability, working under the MaThRad grant at the University of Warwick, after completing his Master’s in Mathematics (MMath) at the University of Bath in 2022.His research interests lie in the field of probability and stochastic processes, his master’s thesis focused on stochastic processes with respect to cosmic rays.

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Veronika Chronholm

Veronika is a PhD student at the SAMBa Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Bath. Her PhD research is supervised by Professor Tristan Pryer and Professor Alex Cox, and focuses on the intersection of stochastic models and partial differential equation models for proton radiation, in the application of proton beam therapy and radiotherapy treatment planning. Her interests also include PDE constrained optimisation, Monte Carlo methods, and numerical methods for PDEs.

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Jamie Edwards

Jamie is a PhD student at the Cambridge Nuclear Energy Centre, working on developing alternative geometric representations which are better suited to fusion geometries. One initial step towards this is the implementation of Bezier based geometry types in the Cambridge Monte Carlo code SCONE which has been completed and has shown potential. The project will involve testing new ways of describing geometry and different ways of performing neutron tracking on them. SCONE is the perfect place to try some geometry types and tracking methods initially.

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Matt Evans

Matt is a PhD student at the University of Bath, supervised by Tristan Pryer and Luca Zanett, Matt’s PhD project ‘Finite element methods for the Boltzmann neutron transport equation on polygonal and polyhedral meshes’ is being carried out in collaboration with the CEA, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission.

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Daniel Hajnal

Daniel is a PhD student at the University of Bath, working on quantifying the personalised impact of physical and biological uncertainties in radiotherapy treatment planning. His research is jointly supervised by Tristan Pryer from the University of Bath and Mohammad Hussein (NPL), Ana Lourenco (NPL), and Catharine Clark (UCLH). The goal of the project is to help produce more personalised, thus safer radiotherapy treatment plans, by incorporating key patient-specific uncertainties, whether physical or biological.

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Maximillian Kraus

Max is a PhD student at the Cambridge Nuclear Energy Centre, working on developing a novel neutron transport method for transient neutron flux simulations. My work will introduce a time-dependent neutron transport solver based on the novel random ray method, which is able to deliver high-accuracy results for nuclear engineering problems of any complexity.

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Usman Laden

Usman Ladan is currently a PhD student in the Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick, working under the joint supervision of Andreas Kyprianou, Emma Horton and Adam Johansen. His research interests lie in the areas of stochastic processes, stochastic analysis, branching processes and Monte Carlo methods. His PhD work focuses on the modelling and simulation of neutron transport within nuclear reactors. Together with his supervisors, he will be understanding existing nuclear algorithms through a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) framework in order to derive new SMC based algorithms with increased efficiency and performance.

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Jenny Power

Jenny is a PhD student at the University of Bath, working on brachytherapy treatment for cancer patients. Brachytherapy is a type of radiation treatment that consists of placing sealed, radioactive sources directly into or next to the tumour to be treated. These sources emit radiation which kills the tumour. The main question this project will address is “Where should these radioactive seeds be placed (and how many of them), such that the dose on the critical organs is minimised?”. The aim of this work is to develop a numerical model which will determine the optimal placements of these radioactive sources such that the damage on the critical organs and surrounding tissue is minimal, but the dose on the tumour is still high enough to eradicate it.

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Nathan Ravoisin

Nathan Ravoisin is a PhD student at the Cambridge Nuclear Energy Centre, working on the multi-physics coupling of Monte Carlo neutron transport simulations. His project investigates the modelling of heat transfer phenomena as Monte Carlo processes, such as via phonon transport. Due to its high modularity and its ability to readily prototype new ideas, the Cambridge Nuclear Energy Centre’s in-house Monte Carlo code, SCONE, will be used to model heat transfer via Monte Carlo methods and investigate its coupling with neutron transport.

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Martin Skretteberg

Martin Skretteberg is a PhD student at the Cambridge Nuclear Energy Centre, working on how time-dependent MC methods, and their coupling with multi-physics can be made more viable through variance reduction using classical methods of variance reduction as well as some novel methods based on machine learning.

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Matthew Peter

I am in my second year studying a PhD

 at the University of Warwick, jointly supervised by Prof. Andreas Kyprianou, Prof. Dario Spano, and Dr Julia Brettschneider. I am particularly interested in studying Bayesian approaches to inverse problems that arise from stochastic processes, and I am currently working on the research project ‘Characterising Uncertainty in Proton Beam Radiotherapy’.

Before starting the PhD programme, I obtained a BSc in MORSE from the University of Warwick in 2023 and an MSc in Statistical Science from the University of Oxford in 2024.

Outside of MathRad, I enjoy of music of many genre (but particularly jazz fusion and R&), and I play piano and bass guitar.  

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Gianmarco Del Pino

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Professor Dario Spano

Dario is a Professor in the Statistics Department at the University of Warwick. His interests are combinatorial stochastic processes, measure-valued processes and special functions arising in exchangeable and partially exchangeable models, with main applications in Mathematical Population Genetics, Bayesian Nonparametric Statistics.

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Professor Adam Johansen

Adam is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Warwick; his research focuses upon methodological and theoretical aspects of simulation-based algorithms.

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Dr Jere Koskela

Jere is a Reader of Statistics at Newcastle University. He completed his PhD on Monte Carlo inference in genetics at the University of Warwick Mathematics Institute in 2016. He was then a postdoc at TU Berlin, and faculty at the Warwick Department of Statistics for six years, prior to joining Newcastle in 2023. His research interests include probabilistic modelling, particularly with interacting particle systems and diffusions, Bayesian nonparametric statistics, and simulation-based inference algorithms.

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Dr Julia Brettschneider

Julia is a Reader in the Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick. She is a statistical data scientist with initial training in probability and ergodic theory, with a passion for interdisciplinary project-oriented work. Julia works closely with experts from domains including genomics, microscopy, neuroscience, medicine, epidemiology, wearable devices, manufacturing, complex projects monitoring, ecology, and crop management.

She develop methods to assess and optimise data quality, to maximise information and knowledge gained from experiments, and model joint and individual decision processes from axiomatic/rational as well as subjective/descriptive perspectives. She has a particular interest in explicit modeling of uncertainty in high-throughput scientific measurement processes.

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Dr Fillipe Georgiou

Fillipe is Mathematical Innovation Research Associate with the Institute for Mathematical Innovation (IMI) at the University of Bath. He has a wide-range of research interests encompassing collective behaviour, climate science, risk analysis, machine learning, and statistics. His enthusiasm lies in devising innovative solutions for complex challenges. 

Prior to joining the IMI, Fillipe engaged in a diverse array of projects. Serving as an embedded systems designer, he developed wireless telemetry units for equines to enable real-time health and fitness monitoring. Then, during his PhD, Fillipe investigated the impact of food distribution on locust group dynamics, uncovering insights into the interplay between food availability and group formation. Subsequently, his post-doctoral contributions with the Climate Risk Group involved assessing the global repercussions of climate change on physical assets. 

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Laura Hattam

Laura is Mathematical Innovation Research Associate with the Institute for Mathematical Innovation (IMI) at the University of Bath. Her research interests are in Applied Mathematics and modelling real-world systems. Past projects at the IMI have involved differential equation modelling, predictive data modelling and sequential Monte Carlo methods.

Previously, Laura was a Postdoc at the University of Reading, where she was part of the Thames Valley Vision Project with project partners Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, which entailed forecasting the uptake of low carbon technologies due to social factors with agent-based modelling, as well as estimating the load impact on the UK electricity network. In addition, through this role, she worked with AND Technology Research developing an energy disaggregation algorithm that used a dynamical systems approach, which was implemented with their energy monitoring equipment.

Laura completed her PhD at Monash University, Australia, which focused on multi-scale asymptotic theory. 

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Dr Colin Baker

Colin is a Consultant Clinical Scientist, Head of Radiotherapy Physics at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust and Visiting Professor at the University of Reading. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine and has over 25 years’ experience as a Radiotherapy Physicist in the NHS in addition to 9 years as Lecturer in Medical Physics at the University of Liverpool.

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Prof Alex Cox

Alex is a Professor of Probability at the University of Bath. Broadly, he is interested in any problems relating to optimisation under uncertainty. Previous work includes applications in economics and finance.

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Dr Emma Horton

Emma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick.

Her research interests include branching processes, growth-fragmentation processes, Feynman-Kac formulae and sequential Monte Carlo methods. I am particularly interested in applications to radiation transport such as the neutron transport equation, and telomere length dynamics.

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Prof Andreas Kyprianou (PI)

Andreas is a specialist in Probability Theory and is co-founder of the Probability Laboratory at Bath (Prob-L@B), based in the University’s Department of Mathematical Sciences in Bath, serving as its Director from 2007-2019. Between 2013 and 2022, he served as co-Director and PI of the multi-million-pound EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistical Applied Mathematics at Bath (SAMBa). Between 2020 and 2023,  he additionally served as Director of the Institute for Mathematical Innovation.

In 2023, he moved to the University of Warwick to take up a chair in Probability Theory. At Warwick, he has additionally taken on the role of Director of the Centre for Mathematical and Computing Science. Andreas is the PI of the MaThRad EPSRC programme grant.

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Dr Ana Lourenco

Ana is a member of the Medical Radiation Science group at the National Physical Laboratory. She is leading research to improve the dosimetry of proton therapy beams, including the development of tissue-equivalent materials, determination of kQ factors using calorimetric measurements and development of dosimetric audits. Ana is supervising a number of PhD and MSc students and she holds an Honorary Research position at the University College London, Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering Department.

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Dr Sarah Osman

Sarah is a Clinical Scientist working as a SABR and Imaging Trials Physicist at University College London Hospitals and for the National Radiotherapy Trials QA (RTTQA). She previously worked as a senior Clinical Scientist at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust (Nov2020-April2022) and as research fellow at Queens University Belfast where she was also a member of the advanced radiotherapy group at the Northern Ireland Cancer Centre working on several projects related to clinical trials.

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Prof Geoff Parks

Geoff is a Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Cambridge.

Geoff heads the Computational Design Group in the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre, which researches into the application of advanced optimisation methods to difficult real-world problems in a wide variety of application areas including aerodynamic, nuclear and structural engineering, in the development and application of multiobjective optimisation methods, and in the effective exploitation and integration of optimisation methods within the Engineering Design process.

His research interests include Computational design, Multiobjective optimisation, Nuclear reactor design and simulation, In-core nuclear fuel management, Future nuclear systems, and Thorium-based nuclear fuel cycles.

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Prof Tristan Pryer

Tristan is a Professor of Numerical Analysis at the University of Bath since 2019. Prior to that he was Associate Professor the University of Reading. His research interests include the design and implementation of rigorous numerical schemes for complex fluids problems. He leverages these in, amongst others, healthcare applications like external beam radiotherapy treatment planning with collaborators and stakeholders over various NHS trusts, medical physics laboratories and international industrial partners.

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Prof Eugene Shwageraus

Eugene is a Professor in Nuclear Energy Systems Engineering at Cambridge University Engineering Department and he is the Course Director for the MPhil in Nuclear Energy.

His research is focused on physics and engineering of conventional and advanced nuclear power reactors, with a particular interest in Monte Carlo methods applied to radiation transport, as well as modelling of nuclear systems to assist policy decision making.

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Prof Paul Smith

Paul has 46 years’ experience as a mathematical modeller, including 39 years in the nuclear industry. 

Paul is the Technical Director of the ANSWERS software service, developing software for reactor physics, criticality and shielding for the nuclear industry worldwide. In particular he has been involved in the application of data assimilation to radiation transport to reduce uncertainty associated with predictive models.

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