The Red Lotus Project is an informal interdisciplinary consortium of academic, industry and governmental stakeholders involving in surface engineering and its implications for heat transfer, sustainability and energy harvesting applications, among others.
Mission of the Red Lotus Project
"Red" denotes "heat" and "lotus" refers to the lotus leaf effect, which is a metaphor for tuning the surface properties of a material to attain certain desirable physico-chemical or performance objectives.
The project participants organise regular video-conference events, lectures, minisymposia at international conferences, workshops, summer schools and lecture series, and collaborative "sand-pit" events to foster interaction in this highly interdisciplinary area.
The Red Lotus Project Inaugural Workshop was held at Chicheley Hall in 2016, and was sponsored by the Royal Society.
News and Activities
December 2025: Anna Curran successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled "Special function solutions of complex differential equations and their application to Marangoni flows". Her advisors were Profs D. Crowdy and D. Papageorgiou. Anna was also shortlisted for the 2025 Lighthill-Thwaites Prize at the British Applied Mathematics Colloquium 2025 held in Exeter.
October 2024: Congratulations to Dr. Toby Kirk, who has a long association with the ACCA and Red Lotus Project groups at Imperial College, on becoming a Lecturer in Mathematical Modelling at the University of Southampton.
May 2024: Dr. Henry Rodriguez-Broadbent, a PhD student of Prof. Darren Crowdy whose thesis was entitled "Analytical methods for multi-phase, multi-physics systems", graduated with his PhD and has moved to a position in Citibank, Canary Wharf.
September 2023: Dr. Hiroyuki Miyoshi, a PhD student supervised by Prof. Darren Crowdy graduated in August 2023 with his PhD thesis entitled "Novel applications of complex analysis to effective parameter quantification in transport Theory". He has since become an assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo.
August 2023: The Red Lotus Project held a mini-symposium at the 10th International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, at Waseda University, Tokyo.
June 2023: Dr. Elena Louca, who graduated with her PhD under Prof. Darren Crowdy in 2016, joined the Climate and Atmosphere Research Center (CARE-C) at The Cyprus Institute as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
April 2023: Professor Hodes and Professor Yuri Muzychka of the Memorial University of Newfoundland delivered a 2-hour perspective entitled Fundamentals and Applications of Spreading Resistances sponsored by the ASME Heat Transfer Division. Connections between spreading resistance and flow and heat transfer along superhydrophobic surfaces were discussed at some length.
Hiroyuki Miyoshi, Anna Katsiavria, and Henry Rodriguez Broadbent presented their research at the British Applied Mathematics Colloquium in Bristol.
March 2023: Further congratulations to Anna Curran, whose entry won the Faculty of Natural Science's PhD Student Photo Competition's Best Picture in the Judge's Choice Awards!
(Previously) Congratulations to Anna Curran, whose superhydrophobic entry (right) to the Faculty of Natural Science's PhD Student Photo Competition has been shortlisted!
January 2023: Welcome to Sebastian Zimmerman, who will be joining us as a visiting student for three months from RPTU Kaiserslautern.