Rate My Professor Suzanne Fielding

Suzanne Fielding is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Durham University. She obtained her first degree in physics from the University of Oxford in 1997 and her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2000. During her doctoral research under the supervision of Mike Cates and Peter Sollich, she developed the influential soft glassy rheology model, published in the Journal of Rheology that year. Following her PhD, she conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Leeds from 2000 to 2003 with Peter Olmsted, focusing on shear banding. She then held an EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Theoretical Physics from 2003 to 2006, working between Leeds and Manchester. From 2005 to 2009, she served as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. In 2009, she joined the Department of Physics at Durham University, where she was promoted to Reader and subsequently to Professor in 2013.

Professor Fielding's research specializes in soft condensed matter physics, particularly the theoretical and computational statistical mechanics and rheology of complex fluids and soft materials such as colloids, emulsions, foams, microgels, surfactants, liquid crystals, and polymers, along with biological systems like bioactive fluids and tissues. Her key interests include the dynamics and rheology of yield stress fluids, shear banding as non-equilibrium phase transitions, extensional necking instabilities, edge fracture in viscoelastic materials, fluid-fluid demixing under shear, viscoelastic turbulence, and flows in porous media. She has secured major funding including EPSRC Advanced Research and Postdoctoral Fellowships, ERC Consolidator Grant (2012-2017) on geometry, instability, and activity in complex fluids, and ERC Advanced Grant (2020-2025) on multiscale rheology of yield stress fluids. Notable publications include 'Rheology of giant micelles' (Advances in Physics, 2006, 411 citations), 'Perspectives on viscoelastic flow instabilities and elastic turbulence' (Physical Review Fluids, 2022), 'Reduced stress propagation leads to increased mechanical failure resistance in auxetic materials' (PNAS, 2024), and 'Discontinuous Shear Thickening in Biological Tissue Rheology' (Physical Review X, 2024). She has delivered 71 invited presentations internationally and serves on editorial boards for the Journal of Rheology and Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics. Her contributions are recognized with the Arthur B. Metzner Early Career Award (Society of Rheology, 2010), Annual Award (British Society of Rheology, 2017), Journal of Rheology Publication Award (2017), and Weissenberg Award (European Society of Rheology, 2025), reflected in an h-index of 40 and over 5100 citations.