From Tehran to Penryn

The Associate Professor is from the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Tehran, Iran; his visit has been enabled by a Scheme 5 grant from the London Mathematical Society, applied for and arranged by the ESI’s Prof. Stuart Townley, who oversaw Prof. Rokni Lamouki's PhD in the early years of this century.

One of Prof. Rokni Lamouki’s specialities, and an interest he shares with both Prof. Townley and Dr Markus Mueller of the ESI, is dynamical systems theory. This is an area of mathematics that deals, broadly speaking, with the long-term behaviour and nature of systems that might be mechanical or otherwise physical, as well as systems that arise in biology, economics, and elsewhere. Prof. Rokni Lamouki, for example, has researched a mathematical model for the admission process in intensive care units, while his ESI counterparts have similarly investigated areas such as pesticide use and, more recently, integrated workplace management solutions (or IWMS) which is to say: real estate, capital projects, energy consumption, facility management, maintenance operations, asset management and employee services. The focus of research during this visit will be mathematical models of the thyroid.

Professor Lamouki’s visit is especially significant given that it is less than a year since the British embassy re-opened in Tehran. It is the strengthening ties between the two countries that make a visit like this possible now, as Prof. Townley said:

“We are very pleased that Reza is spending his time living and working alongside us. Not only does it pick up the threads of our professional association from as long ago as 2003, when Reza was my PhD student, it also shows the recovery in relations between our countries.”