School of Mathematics

Our Researchers

Many of our academic staff are directly involved with sustainability research, in areas like energy, biodiversity and food supply.

Read below for a snapshot of just some of the sustainability-related research in the School, in the researcher's own words.

Energy and Resilience

Miguel Anjos

My research is concerned with using mathematical optimization to provide guaranteed optimal, or near-optimal, solutions for important classes of large-scale discrete nonlinear optimization problems arising in engineering applications. In particular, mathematical optimization can help to improve the overall performance of electric power systems, which are of critical importance to sustainability.

I’m working to support the development of smart grids. These combine a traditional electrical power production, transmission, and distribution system with a two-way flow of information and energy between suppliers and consumers. This combination is expected to deliver energy savings and cost reductions, which are both key in keeping energy sustainable. I was also the Founding Director of the “Trottier Institute for Energy” at Polytechnique Montreal. The Institute was inaugurated in May 2013 and promotes sustainable solutions to secure the future of energy; with them I further served on the Energy Futures Project as an Expert Reviewer.

 

Chris Dent

My main focus these days is on the National Digital Twin programme’s Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) where I’m the technical lead. The Climate Resilience Demonstrator is looking at climate resilience of local area infrastructure systems – water, electric grid, data networks -- particularly their exposure to the risk of flooding. This brings together the important societal application with the overall goals of the Digital Twin programme which are about interoperability of data, and modelling between organisations.

 

Ilaria Salerno

I focus my PhD research on the heating and cooling consumption of the built environment by looking at two key areas: daily operations and the design process of buildings. Currently, we use approximately 30 kWh/day/dwelling for heating/cooling our homes. In order to optimise daily operations, our aim is to control the energy behaviour of a building by using the building itself.

 

Lars Schewe

I'm working in mathematical optimization. The goal is to support people in making decisions. I build mathematical models to derive optimal decisions. I have experience in various problems in the optimization of energy systems and energy markets. Currently, my main project is the optimal outage planning system (Optimal Outage Planning System — University of Edinburgh Research Explorer) that we're building with National Grid ESO.
 

 

Amy Wilson

My work is centred on statistics and uncertainty. A large part of the climate crisis is (a) understanding what the current situation is, in terms of the climate and the use of energy, and understanding how these might evolve through time; and (b) understanding what can be done through policy to change the current trajectories. Mathematics has a lot to contribute to both of those points. For example, large computer simulators are often used to study the evolution of energy systems and to study the effect of different policy choices, but these simulators are not the real-world. Linking the outputs of the simulators to the real-world so that we can make robust decisions is a statistical problem.

 

Biodiversity in a changing climate

Nicole Augustin

I have worked on developing statistical methodology using Generalised Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) for spatio-temporal trend estimation of natural resources, namely forests and fish stocks. For both, the methodology has been used to ensure sustainable management. The methodology relating to forests has been developed in close collaboration with forestry experts in Germany and has been adopted for official reporting in the national survey of German forest soil. Additionally, it has been used in reports on forest health for the states of Baden-Württemberg, Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia; improving the monitoring of forest health in Germany.

 

Ruth King

I am a statistical ecologist with interests in developing new statistical methods/models and their application to different ecosystems. Particular areas of interest include capture-recapture-type models; state-space models and hidden Markov models. These methods are applied to different ecological systems to address questions such as estimating population abundance (or trends); identifying underlying factors that drive ecological populations; and developing methods for improved inference via integrated modelling approaches.

 

Stuart King

My research area is applied computational mathematics and data science. In particular this encompasses using remote sensing Earth observation data to answer questions of environmental or ecological significance. I have interests in applications of mathematics to detect forest loss and heat stress, natural hazard monitoring, and wildlife population detection and monitoring.

 

Tom Leinster

Within sustainability, my main focus is biodiversity. Realistic measures of biodiversity should reflect not only the relative abundances of species, but also the differences between them; in my work I have created a natural family of diversity measures taking both factors into account. This is not just another addition to the already long list of diversity indices. Instead, it is a single formula that subsumes many of the most popular indices (like Shannon's, Simpson's, species richness, and Rao's quadratic entropy), which can then be used and understood in a unified way, with the relationships between them made plain. I’m also an advocate for the use of diversity profiles, which provide a graphical representation of the shape of an ecological community; they show how the perceived diversity changes as the emphasis shifts from rare to common species. Communities can usefully be compared by considering their diversity profiles, which is a far more subtle method than any relying on any single statistic.

 

Gail Robertson

I am a statistical consultant in the School of Mathematics’ Statistical Consultancy Unit. I work with academics and industry clients on various research projects providing statistical advice, carrying out data analysis, and developing new statistical methodologies. My background in ecology and spatial analysis mean that many of the projects I work on have an environmental focus, such as modelling the distribution of environmental contaminants across space, designing sampling regimes for the detection of contaminants, and developing appropriate modelling techniques to understand seabird behaviour at sea.

 

Sustainable food supply

Ben Goddard

I am an industrial coordinator for MAC-MIGS, helping to organise the work students and academics do with the industrial partners. MAC-MIGS is a PhD programme in Mathematical Modelling, Analysis and Computation run together by the Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt universities, under the banner of the Maxwell Institute. Many of the PhD students undertake projects relating to sustainability, for example studying how wind turbines affect bird migration, flight patterns and nesting behaviour.

 Julian Hall

I work in the field of optimization, which can be used for many practical purposes. My main interest is in solving large linear programming problems and developing optimization software, which is a fundamental tool that people can use in various applications, such as maximizing cost, or minimizing impact on the environment.

From my work in the latter, I've found out firsthand that one of the interesting things about mathematics, in a sustainability context, is that it can lead you to rather surprising and counter-intuitive results. I was involved in a collaboration with the Roslin Institute that led to such a conclusion when researching the sustainability of beef production in the Brazilian Cerrado.