Alison Sarah Tomlin is a British

physical chemist Physical chemistry is the study of macroscopic and microscopic phenomena in chemical systems in terms of the principles, practices, and concepts of physics such as motion, energy, force, time, thermodynamics, quantum chemistry, statistical mech ...

and

applied mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

whose research involves building detailed mathematical models of

combustion Combustion, or burning, is a high-temperature exothermic redox chemical reaction between a fuel (the reductant) and an oxidant, usually atmospheric oxygen, that produces oxidized, often gaseous products, in a mixture termed as smoke. Combust ...

, including

uncertainty quantification Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is the science of quantitative characterization and reduction of uncertainties in both computational and real world applications. It tries to determine how likely certain outcomes are if some aspects of the system a ...

for those models. She is a professor in the School of Chemical and Process Engineering at the

University of Leeds , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

, where she heads the Clean Combustion Research Group.

Education and career

Tomlin was a student of mathematics and of the

history of science The history of science covers the development of science from ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural, social, and formal. Science's earliest roots can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Meso ...

and

philosophy of science Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ulti ...

at the University of Leeds, where she earned a combined bachelor's degree in those topics in 1987. She continued at Leeds as a graduate student in physical chemistry, completing her dissertation ''Bifurcation analysis for non-linear chemical kinetics'' in 1990. After earning her doctorate, and performing post-doctoral research at Leeds and

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

, she returned to Leeds as a lecturer in the Department of Fuel and Energy in 1994.

Book

With Tamás Turányi, Tomlin is coauthor of the book ''Analysis of Kinetic Reaction Mechanisms'' (Springer, 2014).

Recognition

A paper coauthored by Tomlin won the 1992

Sugden Award The Sugden Award is an annual award for contributions to combustion research. The prize is awarded by the British Section of The Combustion Institute for the published paper with at least one British Section member as author, which makes the mos ...

The Combustion Institute The Combustion Institute is an educational non-profit, international, scientific and engineering society whose purpose is to promote research in combustion science. The institute was established in 1954, and its headquarters are in Pittsburgh, Penn ...

. Tomlin was elected to the inaugural 2018 class of Fellows of The Combustion Institute, "for innovative research on the development and application of mechanism reduction, sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification in combustion models".

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Tomlin, Alison Year of birth missing (living people) Living people British chemists British women chemists British mathematicians British women mathematicians Physical chemists British applied mathematicians Academics of the University of Leeds Fellows of the Combustion Institute