Rosemary Renauts recent research is focused on the design and analysis of computational algorithms for solving problems arising mainly in medical and geophysical applications. In particular, the commonality between these apparently disparate disciplines is the need to infer physical information, say about the Earth substructure or an internal organ such as the brain, from measurements that are taken relating to a model of a physical situation. In the geophysics situation this might be gravity survey measurements taken on the surface over an area in which one expects to find a variable subsurface structure, characterized by different density values. This situation typifies many of the challenges associated with effectively and solving inverse problems, namely that the sample size is typically small in relation to the required number of parameters, that the data are often corrupted by noise, and that the underlying model is ill-posed.
