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I'm an honorary scientist (recently retired) in the Chemistry and Materials Group of the Hartree Centre (part of STFC) located in the Daresbury Laboratory campus near Warrington, UK. Prior to that I was for many years a staff scientist at Unilever R&D Port Sunlight near Liverpool, UK.
I trained as a physicist and I still regard myself as such. My research interests include statistical physics, soft matter, and fluid mechanics, and more recently physical biology and systems biology:
phase behaviour of complex mixtures: colloids, polymers, and surfactants;
hydrodynamics, diffusiophoresis, and other microscale transport processes;
coarse-grained simulation methodologies such dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) and lattice Boltzmann (LB);
noise and stochasticity in biological systems: sub-cellular processes, microbial ecology (neutral models);
systems biology: epidermal homeostasis, metabolic flux balance analysis (FBA).
My PhD was on fractal aggregation with Robin Ball in the Theory of Condensed Matter Group in Cambridge (1987-90). Following that I had post-doc positions at Unilever with Moti Lal and Ian Robb (1990-1), and subsequently in the Physics department in the University of Edinburgh with Peter Pusey and Wilson Poon (1991-2). I then took a permanent position at Unilever (1992-2020). In 2004 I enjoyed a two month sabbatical in Pieter Rein ten Wolde's group at AMOLF where I was also a visiting Professor in the University of Amsterdam; and in 2006 a two week visit to Trey Ideker's lab in UCSD. I was also lucky to be seconded to work with two West Coast biotech companies: Entelos (now part of Rosa & Co) (2008), and Genomatica.
From October 2020 I joined the Hartree Centre (part of STFC) as a member of the technical staff, after a transitionary period working for both organisations (Hartree and Unilever). I have recently officially retired (2026) but have retained honorary staff status and continue to work with colleagues in the Chemistry and Materials Group in Hartree on various industry-related and foundational problems.
I maintain close contacts with the Edinburgh soft matter group and particularly the Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership which has much in common with the Hartree Centre in terms of approach and links to industry. I am an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy in Edinburgh (2022-28), and also an Associate Member of the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics.
I was an Editorial Board member for Physical Review E (6-year term ended Dec 2017), and an EPL Co-Editor (5-year term ended May 2011) and Advisory Board member (term ended April 2014). I have also been on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. I'm currently on the CECAM Scientific Advisory Committtee (SAC).
I've been a member of the American Physical Society (APS) since 1992.
In 2010 I was included in that year's cohort of APS Outstanding Referees, and I am still (2026) the only UK industrial scientist to have received this recognition.
Solvay Prize of European Colloid and Interface Society (ECIS), 2022
In 2022 I was greatly honored to be awarded this Prize (now known as the ECIS-Syensqo Prize).
Here's the link to the citation: https://www.ecis-web.eu/awards/ecis-solvay-award/2022-patrick-warren/
Apparently I am the only industrial scientist to be so recognised, though arguably Gordon Tiddy, who was awarded the Prize in 2008, was also an industrialist but by that time he had retired from Unilever and was in Manchester.
Ig Nobel (Physics) Prize, 2012
In 2012, Joe Keller, Ray Goldstein, Robin Ball, and me, won that year's Ig Nobel prize in physics (link here).
The citation reads: "for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail".
Joe Keller's work was on ponytail dynamics: SIAM J. Appl. Math. 70, 2667-72 (2010);
Our work was on ponytail shapes: Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 078101 (2012).
Contact details
Contact details
Prof Dr Patrick B Warren, PhD,
Hartree Centre, STFC Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington, WA4 4AD, UK;
School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Edinburgh, UK.
For professional and business-related email please use: patrick.warren@stfc.ac.uk
For personal email please use: patrickbwarren@gmail.com
My old Unilever email address (patrick.warren@unilever.com) has long vanished.
Private messages (PMs) sent through LinkedIn or Facebook are likely to go unread for months ; I've enough trouble keeping on top of regular email !!
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