people

Thibault Bertrand, PhD

Dr Bertrand is a Senior Strategic Teaching Fellow in Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London. Trained as a theoretical physicist, his expertise is in non equilibrium statistical mechanics and soft condensed matter.

Before moving to the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London in 2018, he was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr Raphaël Voituriez at Sorbonne Université (Laboratoire Jean Perrin). Thibault was trained in the Department of Physics at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan for his undergrad obtaining both a BSc and a MSc. In 2016, he graduated with a PhD from Yale University (New Haven, CT, USA) where he worked on jamming in model disordered systems under the supervision of Prof Corey S. O'Hern (Yale) and in collaboration with Prof Mark D. Shattuck (CCNY). He is the recipient of the Harding Bliss Prize from Yale University and the President's Medal for Teaching Innovation at Imperial College London.

Contact: t.bertrand@imperial.ac.uk


Current group members


Henry Alston

PhD Student

As an undergraduate, Henry studied mathematics at Imperial College London and joined the group in Autumn 2020 as a PhD student. His master's thesis focused on the phase transition phenomena present in two systems of self-organisation through velocity and body-attitude alignment. He is currently working on applying Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics techniques to understand the emergent behaviour in active and living systems.


Eloise Lardet

PhD Student

Eloise joined the group as a PhD student in 2022, funded by a President's PhD Scholarship, after finishing her MMath degree at the University of Edinburgh. She had previously completed a research project in the group as part of the Mary Lister McCammon Summer Research Fellowship at Imperial in 2021, looking at phase separation and pattern formation in pigment cells. She is now continuing her research on collective behaviour in active matter to understand various biological phenomena (e.g. flocking and intercellular interactions) and explore the fundamental physics in these non-equilibrium systems.


Callum Britton

PhD Student (co-supervised with Dr Gunnar Pruessner)

Callum completed his MSci in Mathematics at Imperial College London. He previously did an Undergraduate Research Opportunity as part of the group in 2021, and has most recently completed his Master’s thesis with Dr. Gunnar Pruessner in the Non-Equilibrium Systems group focusing on the Doi-Peliti field theory of Transiently Chiral ABPs. He continues on as a PhD student exploring active systems numerically and analytically under the co-supervision of T. Bertrand and G. Pruessner.


Yuxin (Tina) Jia

PhD Student

During her undergraduate years, Tina immersed herself in Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She then joined the University of Oxford, focusing on Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing. In the past, she has studied models of avascular tumor growth and hydrodynamic microswimmers in low Reynold environments.Tina joined Imperial College London in Autumn 2023 as a PhD student; she will study the transport of active particles in complex environments. Ultimately, she is interested in the use of microswimmers as targeted drug delivery systems, with the aspiration of transforming cancer treatment methodologies.


Clara Neather

MSc Student

Clara joined Imperial College London in September 2022 after completing a BSc in Mathematics at the University of Bristol. Her MSc is in Applied Mathematics, with a focus on quantum mechanics and mathematical biology. Her research project is on the behaviour of active filaments in crowded environments, modelling active polymer chains in environments with obstacles.


Jane Peltier

MSc Student

Jane joined the group in July 2023 as a Mary Lister McCammon Summer Research Fellow after completing a BSc in Mathematics and Economics at Ecole Polytechnique in France. She is now undertaking an MSc in Applied Mathematics and working on the analytical and numerical investigation of liquid-liquid phase separation with switching and nonreciprocity. She is greatly interested in Computational Mathematics, Applied Dynamical Systems, Mathematical Biology, and applying Stochastic Processes to Biological Modeling.


Tamsin Sandhu

MSc Student


Will Taylor

MSci Student


Xinyu Zhao

MSci Student

Xinyu is a year-four student in the Mathematics programme at Imperial College London. She is passionate about applied maths, including methods such as asymptotic analysis, mathematical biology and their applications to chemistry. Her current research project involves studying time-reversal symmetry breaking in reaction-diffusion systems by means of analytics and numerics.


Peiyu (Ray) Lyu

MSci Student



Group photo following a joint group meeting with the nonequilibrium systems group of Gunnar Pruessner, November 4th 2022.


Former members


PhD students and postdocs

  • Andrew Killeen (PhD student, Imperial College London, 2019-2023)

  • Shalabh Anand (Postdoctoral fellow, Imperial College London, 2020-2022)

MSc, MSci and undergraduate students

  • Jane Peltier (Mary Lister-McCammon Fellow, Ecole Polytechnique, 2023)

  • Edward Erasmie-Jones (MSc in Applied Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2023)

  • Caetano Genete-Visan (MSci in Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2023)

  • Hanchun Wang (MSc in Applied Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2022)

  • Bilal Botté (MSc in Applied Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2022)

  • Filip Weidler (MSci in Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2022)

  • Eleanor Hall (MSci in Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2022)

  • Eloise Lardet (Mary Lister-McCammon Fellow, University of Edinburgh, 2021)

  • Jonathan Rubin (UROP Student, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2021)

  • Dana Weetman (UROP Student, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2021)

  • Callum Britton (UROP Student, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2021)

  • Su Lee (UROP Student, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2021)

  • Urte Adomaityte (MSc in Applied Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2021)

  • Deepti Kannan (MSc in Applied Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2021)

  • Shivan Parmar (MSci in Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2021)

  • Eleni Chousa (MSc in Applied Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2020)

  • Franck Pan (MSc in Applied Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2020)

  • Wan Ying Siaw (MSc in Applied Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2020)

  • Nikolay Smirnov (MSci in Mathematics and Computing, Imperial College London, 2020)

  • Lorenzo Signore (UROP Student, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2020)

  • Hugo Chu (UROP Student, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2019-2020)

  • Tianqi Liu (UROP Student, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2019-2020)

  • Hajar Ouaaline (MSc in Applied Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2019)

  • Angeliki Dermitzaki (MSc in Applied Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2019)

  • Maxwell Buckmire-Monro (MSc in Applied Mathematics, Imperial College London, 2019)

  • Kai Law (UROP Student, Department of Physics, Imperial College London, 2019)