Professor William Parnell
Professor of Applied Mathematics
William J. Parnell is Professor of Applied Mathematics and EPSRC Research Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. His main research interests reside in developing new applied mathematical techniques in order to model, design and fabricate materials with novel mechanical and acoustic properties and principally complex composites and metamaterials. He has specific expertise in homogenisation, micromechanics, methods to bridge lengthscales in complex materials and general nonlinear continuum mechanics. He particularly enjoys working at the interface of theory and experimentation and collaborating with industry. He leads the Mathematics of Waves and Materials (MWM) research group at Manchester, which consists of a thriving group of Faculty, Postdocs, PhD students and Masters students.
Parnell received a First Class honours degree in Mathematics from the University of Bristol in 1999, before moving to the University of Oxford to study for a Masters in Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing, graduating with distinction in 2000. After a year travelling he began a PhD (an industrial CASE PhD in collaboration with Thales UK) in 2001 at the University of Manchester. This was supervised by I. David Abrahams (now Director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge), completing this in 2004. His PhD was entitled “Homogenisation techniques for wave propagation in composite materials”.
Parnell has held visiting positions at Universite Paris 6 and 12 (France), University of Trento (Italy), University of Oxford (UK) and Colorado School of Mines and Rutgers (USA). He has published more than 60 research papers and 2 book chapters. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (UK) and became Editor in Chief of the international journal Wave Motion in 2017. He held an EPSRC Early Career Research Fellowship from 2014-19 and had this extended until 2022, with the extension project focussing on the area of nano-reinforced syntactic foams and acoustic and elastodynamic metamaterials. In 2019 he was awarded a Whitehead prize from the London Mathematical Society “for highly novel and extensive research contributions in the fields of acoustic and elastodynamic metamaterials and theoretical solid mechanics, as well as excellence in the promotion of mathematics in industry”.
