Prof. Matthew Piggott is Professor of Computational Geoscience and Engineering at Imperial College London. He is a member of the Department of Earth Science and Engineering where he Heads the Computational Geoscience and Engineering Research Section. He obtained Masters and PhD degrees in Mathematics from the University of Bath, specialising in Numerical Analysis and joined Imperial College London in 2001. He is Deputy Director for the NERC Doctoral Training Partnership “Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet”. His research interests include the development of advanced open source numerical methods for environmental flows utilising adaptive mesh methods and massively parallel algorithms, along with inversion, optimisation and uncertainty quantification techniques, and their application across a range of environmental and energy motivated problems.
He has authored 100+ peer reviewed publications in these areas, raised over £10M of UK Research Council and industrial funding, and supervised 35 PhD students and 20 postdoctoral researchers. Current NERC funding includes a Consortium project NE/K000047/1: “Will climate change in the Arctic increase the landslide-tsunami risk to the UK?” where Prof. Piggott leads a work package on hydrodynamic modelling and quantitative hazard assessment, and NE/S006427/1 on the simulation of the ocean dynamics under ice shelves. Numerical technology development is funded by a series of EPSRC projects, including the Platform EP/L000407/1: “Underpinning technologies for finite element simulation”, recently renewed under EP/R029423/1 “PRISM: Platform for Research In Simulation Methods”, and a Software for the Future project EP/M011054/1: “A new simulation and optimisation platform for marine technology”. He works on or coordinates the development of several computational codes of relevance to this project, including: Fluidity [CFD and marine modelling with finite elements and adaptive unstructured meshes - http://fluidity-project.org]; OpenTidalFarm [simulation and adjoint-based optimisation of tidal turbine arrays - http://opentidalfarm.org]; and Thetis [3D coastal ocean model built using the Firedrake framework - http://thetisproject.org].
