Professor Patrick Farrell

Professor Patrick Farrell undertook his undergraduate studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway (2006) and his doctoral studies at Imperial College London (2010).

After working as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial, he won an EPSRC Early Career Research Fellowship and moved to the Mathematical Institute and Christ Church, Oxford (2013). In 2015 he won the quadrennial Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software and an IMA Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis.

Research Interests

Professor Farrell’s research lies at the junction of mathematics, physics, engineering, and computation.  In his thesis and early postdoctoral work, his research focused on adaptive mesh discretisations: changing the computational mesh in some way to make orders of magnitude efficiency gains in solving complex models. In this work, he solved a problem of computational geometry that had been open in the literature for over twenty years.

In his later postdoctoral work, Dr Farrell has focused on the problem of automatically deriving adjoint models. Adjoints are absolutely essential for many important problems, such as weather prediction, optimising the shape of wings, and quantifying the accuracy of nuclear simulations. He has developed an entirely new approach to deriving adjoint models, which yields dramatic gains in automation, robustness and efficiency – in some cases, from years to days. With these methods in hand, it is now possible to contemplate the automated solution of optimisation problems constrained by the laws of physics. Such applications are of huge interest and importance across all of engineering and the quantitative sciences.

Selected Publications