Isma Leal · Doctoral Researcher at EPFL

MSc in Mathematical Modelling & Scientific Computing - University of Oxford

Doctoral researhcer in numerical methods for partial differential equations and nonlinear dynamics, currently focused on 3D bluff body wakes at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne).


last modified: feb, 2026

Projects

In this page you can find all the academic/professional research projects I have done during my BSc in Physics at King's College London (KCL) and my MSc in Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing at the University of Oxford. The code can be found published on my Github.

kcl 2023 · energy loss in waveguides · final year project

Energy Loss in EM Waveguides

Analysis of the energy loss of a pulse with the waveguide's curvature in an optical fiber through the use of the Finite-Difference Time-Domain method.

oxford 2023 · alzheimer's progression

Prion hypothesis applied to the tau protein using Graph Theory

Modelling spread of misfolded tau proteins using the brain connectome, starting with the Fisher-KPP reaction-diffusion model as a baseline to which biologically-based mechanisms are incorporated.

oxford 2024 · modelling gene dependency

Modelling gene dependencies using Hypergraphs

Used DepMap's gene dependency data to construct a hypergraph of gene dependencies and applied ML algorithms trained on their topological metrics (defining some metrics analogous from Graph Theory) or high-dimensional embeddings to predict gene dependencies in cell lines.

oxford 2023 · Physically-informed neural networks (PINNs)

PINNs exploration

Successfully designed and implemented a neural network with one hidden layer and an arbitrary number of neurons to solve second-order nonlinear one-dimensional ODEs for various boundary conditions, and used PyTorch to build a deep neural network to solve two-dimensional PDEs with different boundary conditions.