Anita Mehta
Academic Visitor and Consultant
Anita Mehta is an Academic Visitor and Consultant at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics.
Professor Mehta is a theoretical physicist of complex systems: in addition to her current research on the modelling of speech perception, she is working on heterogeneities in granular media, mechanisms of long-term memory (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVH1djSzspg&feature=youtu.be ), agent-based modelling of risk and optimisation schemes for NP-complete problems.
A Rhodes Scholar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NojaK4hTDQ), she did her MA and DPhil in theoretical physics at Oxford, and subsequently worked in Cambridge, Birmingham and India. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard in 2006-7, an EPSRC Fellow at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford in 1998-9, and a Leverhulme Visiting Professor in Oxford in 2018-2019.
A Fellow of the American Physical Society, her other interests include writing (fiction and non-fiction), languages (she speaks English, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi and French with native fluency, can get by in Italian and has a basic knowledge of Spanish) and Western classical music (she is a pianist and music critic, see, e.g. https://serenademagazine.com/author/anita-mehta/).
Publications
Anita Mehta (2018) ‘Storing and retrieving long-term memories:
cooperation and competition in synaptic dynamics’, Advances in Physics: X, 3:1, 755-789
Ebadi H, Perry M, Short K, Klemm K, Desplan C, Stadler PF, et al. (2018) ‘Patterning the insect eye: From stochastic to deterministic mechanisms.’ PLoS Comput Biol 14(11): e1006363.
Indu Dhiman, Simon A. J. Kimber, Anita Mehta & Tapan Chatterji (2018) ‘A neutron tomography study: probing the spontaneous crystallization of randomly packed granular assemblies’