Rate My Professor Julia Yeomans

Julia Yeomans is Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, based in the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics. She obtained her BA in Physics with first-class honours and the Scott Prize from the University of Oxford in 1976, followed by a DPhil from the same university in 1979 for her thesis on Critical Phenomena of Disordered Systems. Her career includes a postdoctoral research associate position at Cornell University from 1979 to 1981, lectureships at the University of Oxford (1981-1983) and later (1992-1995), a professorship at the Catholic University of Leuven from 1983 to 1992, a professorship at the University of Padua from 1995 to 1998, and a readership at Oxford from 1998 to 2002. Since 2002, she has held the position of Professor of Physics at Oxford. At St Hilda's College, she was Chan Fellow and Tutor in Physics from 2002 to 2011 and Vice Principal from 2014 to 2019, and she currently serves as Senior Research Fellow; she is also an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College.

Julia Yeomans' research focuses on biological physics and soft condensed matter, utilizing theoretical and computational approaches from statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics. Her work explores the dynamics of soft-matter and active systems, with applications to mechanobiology, developmental biology, cell motility, tissue self-organization, liquid crystals, bacterial swimming, and droplet dynamics in microchannels. Key recent publications include 'Bridging Elastic and Active Turbulence' (2026), 'Low-Pass Filtering of Active Turbulent Flows to Liquid Substrates' (2025), 'From Equilibrium Multistability to Spatiotemporal Chaos in Channel Flows of Nematic Fluids' (2025), 'Why Extensile and Contractile Tissues Could be Hard to Tell Apart' (2025), and 'Cellular dynamics emerging from turbulent flows steered by active filaments' (Physical Review E, 2025). She has received major awards including election as Fellow of the Royal Society (2013), Officer of the Order of the British Empire (2024), Institute of Physics Paul Dirac Medal (2025), EPS-CMD Liquid Matter Prize (2024), Sam Edwards Medal and Prize (2021), and two ERC Advanced Grants (2012-2017 and 2024-2029). Yeomans contributes to editorial boards of journals such as Physical Review Letters and J. Phys. A, and has served on Royal Society Council (2018-2021) and numerous international scientific committees and panels. Her contributions have influenced fields through public lectures including the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture (2023) and the Annual Edward Delaval Lecture (2019).