Affiliated Lecturer
Fellow, College Teaching Officer and Director of Studies in Mathematics, Selwyn College
Director for Academic Programmes, Centre for Scientific Computing
Cavendish Laboratory,
JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge CB3 0HE
Biography:
Graduated from the Department of the Mechanics of Fluids, (Aeronautical Engineering) University of Manchester (which is known for the pioneering work of Osborne Reynolds on turbulent flows). He received his MSc (on Aerospace Propulsion) and PhD on the 'Evolution of Detonation Waves', (supervised by Professor J.F. Clarke FRS and Professor E.F. Toro OBE) from Cranfield Institute of Technology. This was followed by a post-doctoral position at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, where he worked on computational modelling of global atmospheric flows (stratospheric ozone depletion over Northern Latitudes), with Professor J.A. Pyle FRS. From 1996 he was at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, where he was the group leader of the Laboratory of Computational Dynamics (LCD) and the Course Director for CATAM (Computer-Aided Teaching of All Mathematics).
Since 2008 he has been at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he is the Head of the Laboratory for Scientific Computing and the Director for Academic Programmes of the Centre for Scientific Computing of the University of Cambridge.
Research groups
Research Interests
Scientific computing, computational fluid dynamics, Riemann problem based methods for systems of nonlinear inhomogeneous hyperbolic equations, adaptive mesh refinement.
Key Publications
"Developing the next-generation climate system models: challenges and achievements", Julia Slingo, Kevin Bates, Nikos Nikiforakis, Matthew Piggott, Malcolm Roberts, Len Shaffrey,Ian Stevens, Pier Luigi Vidale and Hilary Weller. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 13 March 2009 vol. 367 no. 1890 815-831 Second in the top ten list of downloaded articles in 2009: Link
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, Theme Issue "Mesh generation and mesh adaptation for large-scale Earth-system modelling" compiled and edited by N. Nikiforakis November 28, 2009; 367 (1907) Link
"The mathematical structure of multiphase thermal models of flow in porous media", Daniel E.A van Odyck1, John B Bell, Franck Monmont and Nikolaos Nikiforakis. Proc. R. Soc. A 8 February 2009 vol. 465 no. 2102 523-549.
"Richtmyer-Meshkov instability induced by the interaction of a shock wave with a rectangular block of SF_{6}", Bates, K. R., Nikiforakis, N. & Holder, D. Physics of Fluids 19, 2007, 036101-1-036101-16.
"Adaptive mesh refinement for global atmospheric modelling", N. Nikiforakis, Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, Volume 41, Adaptive Mesh Refinement - Theory and Applications, Tomasz Plewa, Timur Linde and V. Gregory Weirs(editors), Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2005.
A.M.Anile, N.Nikiforakis, V.Romano, G.Russo, "Discretization of semiconductor device problems. II'', Handbook of numerical analysis. Vol. XIII, 443--522, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 2005.
"A Three-Dimensional, Adaptive, Godunov-Type Model for Global Atmospheric Flows", M. E. Hubbard* and N. Nikiforakis, Monthly Weather Review 2003; 131: 1848-1864
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, Theme Issue "Combustion science at the end of the millennium" compiled by K. N. C. Bray and N. Nikiforakis December 1, 1999; 357 (1764) Link
Nikiforakis N. and Clarke J.F. 1996. Quasi-steady structures in the two dimensional initiation of detonations; Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A, 452, 2023-2042.