Dr. Rhoda Joy Hawkins is the Academic Director of AIMS Ghana and a senior lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield.
Rhoda did her undergraduate and masters in physics at the University of Oxford and completed her PhD in 2005 at the University of Leeds under the supervision of Tom McLeish. She then did postdoctoral research in theoretical biological physics at AMOLF in Amsterdam, the Sorbonne Université and Institut Curie in Paris and in the department of mathematics at the University of Bristol. In 2011 she became a lecturer at the University of Sheffield. Her involvement with AIMS started in 2010 and since then she has been a visiting lecturer at the South Africa, Senegal and Ghana centres.
Her primary research interests are in modelling the mechanics and movement of biological cells with applications to disease.