Dr Keith Daly MEng, PhD

Research Fellow

Dr Keith Daly is Research Fellow within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton.

After completing my MEng in electronic engineering at the University of Southampton in 2007 I began my Ph.D. in applied mathematics also at the University of Southampton.

Throughout my Ph.D. and subsequent fellowship I was involved in several different projects relating to the propagation of light in liquid crystal structures. These projects include the efficient modelling of liquid crystal alignment to an applied field based on an invariant manifold technique, application of the liquid crystal model to several novel devices including photorefractive and plasmonic liquid crystal cells and the propagation of light in planar waveguide devices which are used for sensing applications.

I am currently a post-doctoral research fellow studying the flow of water in soil and the uptake of water by roots. My research is theoretical but has ties to experimental studies carried out in Nottingham. The aim is to develop and models of fluid flow and water uptake which are sufficiently general to be applied to representation of real soil structures captured using X-ray CT. The key mathematical technique used is homogenization which we apply to soil structures of different size and scale. The result is a simple set of parameters used to describe fluid flow which capture only the essential details from the soil structure.