Apala Majumdar is a British applied mathematician specialising in the mathematics of

liquid crystal Liquid crystal (LC) is a state of matter whose properties are between those of conventional liquids and those of solid crystals. For example, a liquid crystal can flow like a liquid, but its molecules may be oriented in a common direction as i ...

s. She is a professor of Applied Mathematics at the

University of Strathclyde The University of Strathclyde () is a public research university located in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded in 1796 as the Andersonian Institute, it is Glasgow's second-oldest university, having received its royal charter in 1964 as the first techn ...

Education and career

Majumdar did her undergraduate studies at the

University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a public university, public research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers' school founded in 1595 and University College, Br ...

. As a graduate student at Bristol, she also worked with Hewlett Packard Laboratories. She was awarded a PhD in applied mathematics at the University of Bristol in 2006; her dissertation, ''Liquid crystals and tangent unit-vector fields in polyhedral geometries'', was jointly supervised by Jonathan Robbins and Maxim Zyskin. After working as a Royal Commission of the Exhibition of 1851 Research Fellow at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

, she moved to the

University of Bath The University of Bath is a public research university in Bath, England. Bath received its royal charter in 1966 as Bath University of Technology, along with a number of other institutions following the Robbins Report. Like the University ...

in 2012, having been awarded a 5-year EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship in 2011. At Bath she became a Reader and the Director of the Centre for Nonlinear Mechanics (2018-2019). In 2019 she was appointed as a professor of Applied Mathematics at the

Recognition

The

British Liquid Crystal Society The British Liquid Crystal Society (BLCS) is a charitable trust established to promote education and research on liquid crystals in the United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United ...

gave Majumdar their Young Scientist Award in 2012. The

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's Learned society, learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh ...

gave her their

Anne Bennett Prize The Anne Bennett Prize and Senior Anne Bennett Prize are awards given by the London Mathematical Society. In every third year, the society offers the Senior Anne Bennett prize to a mathematician normally based in the United Kingdom for work in, in ...

in 2015. In 2019 she was the winner of the academic category of the FDM Everywoman in Technology Awards. In 2024, she was elected as a fellow of the

Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was establis ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Majumdar, Apala Year of birth missing (living people) Living people British mathematicians British women mathematicians British applied mathematicians Alumni of the University of Bristol Academics of the University of Bath Academics of the University of Strathclyde Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh