Barbara Turnbull

Barbara is an Associate Professor at Nottingham University. Her previous work was at Cornell, Cambridge and the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research, SLF, Switzerland. Her work was originally motivated by powder snow avalanches, and her PhD focused on lab and filed experiments and modelling the fluid mechanics of these flows. This gave her an appetite for since exploring both ice mechanics and suspension current dynamics more generally. Barbara loves teaching and she chairs the Faculty Athena group, who drive policy to improve the support of women and those with flexible needs in the Faculty.

Her fellowship is about how particles collide and the outcome of that collision: do the particles stick together? Or rebound? To discover how, we track particles transported by well-defined fluid structures, such as vortex rings. To discover what happens, we generate controlled collisions of particles levitated in a superconducting magnet. This builds a picture of how ice aggregates in clouds, how planets have developed from dust or how snacks become jammed in processing plants.