Case study: Professor Jon Trevelyan and Dr Jing Gao

“I applied for the International Exchanges funding as a means of enabling a new cross-disciplinary collaboration. 

"As an engineer, the opportunity arose to work jointly with a Chinese mathematician on a problem of much interest to me, but in which a deeper mathematical knowledge would be helpful. 

"Much of my work in the previous ten years had focused on a numerical method for solving high-frequency wave scattering problems. This was very accurate and in some ways efficient, but the true potential of its efficiency could only be unlocked by finding a fast, yet accurate, method of evaluating highly oscillatory integrals. The Chinese collaborator is an expert in evaluating highly oscillatory integrals. 

"We had three visits funded by the Exchange, though the Chinese collaborator also won significant additional funding to spend a year in another university in the UK. During the period of the grant, I recruited a PhD student to work in this area, and he and I together visited our collaborator in Xi'an for a productive week in 2017. Three conference papers have come out of the work, and two journal articles are in preparation.”