FEATURE
FELLOW IN FOCUS Dr Anthony Ashton Dr Anthony Ashton is a Fellow, Lecturer, Tutor and Director of Studies in Mathematics at the College. This year Anthony was awarded a prestigious Pilkington Prize by the University of Cambridge in recognition of his outstanding contribution to teaching.
How do you motivate your students? I find mathematics an incredibly interesting subject, so one way I try to motivate the students is to share that enthusiasm with them. I try to teach students to treat mathematics not as a collection of isolated topics, but as a rich tapestry in which ideas are often intertwined. This often helps develop intuition and allows the students to see the bigger picture.
How did you end up at Homerton? I’m from a town called Rhyl on the North Wales coast. I went to the local sixth form to study Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. I found Maths the most interesting so it seemed natural to study it at degree level. I studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge for my Mathematics undergraduate degree. Before I came up to Cambridge I had no intention of staying beyond the standard three years. I was certain that I’d want to leave and find a job in the City. However, I found that the more I studied mathematics, the more interested I became in it. After three years at Cambridge and two less-than-exciting summer internships at an investment bank in the City, I decided to stay on to do a bit more maths.
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HOMERTONIAN
After my undergraduate degree I took Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, within which I studied a range of subjects from functional analysis to mathematical physics. I found it quite difficult to focus on just one area, everything seemed very interesting! I realised I was best suited to pursue research in applied analysis: the application of abstract results in analysis to real world problems. After completing Part III I took up a PhD in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, under the supervision of Professor Thanasis Fokas. Based on the research I produced during my PhD, I was awarded the EPSRC Doctoral Prize. This allowed me to extend some of the projects I’d been working on during my PhD and also gave me some time to apply for some academic positions. I was fortunate enough to be awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, which ran from 2010-2013. During my time at Emmanuel I worked on a variety of problems associated with the spectral analysis of strongly elliptic boundary value problems. Based on the results I produced during this period I was awarded the Stokes Fellowship at Pembroke College, which I took up in October 2013. I joined Homerton two years into that position.