Julia Mary Yeomans

Early life and education Yeomans was educated at the University of Oxford where she was an undergraduate student of Somerville College, Oxford, for her BA and a postgraduate student at Wolfson College, Oxford. She was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in theoretical physics in 1979. where her doctoral research on critical phenomena in spin models was supervised by Robin Stinchcombe.

Research and career After two years of working as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University with Michael E. Fisher, she was appointed a lecturer at the Department of Physics at the University of Southampton in 1981. In 1983, she moved to the University of Oxford where she became a professor in 2002.

Honours and awards In 2012, Yeomans was awarded a European Research Council advanced research grant for her research proposal Microflow in complex environments. In 2024 she was awarded a second advanced grant "Exploiting the Parallels between Active Matter and Mechanobiology".

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2013, where her nomination reads:

In 2021 she received the Sam Edwards Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics, for her contributions to soft and active matter, statistical physics and biophysics. In 2024 she was awarded the Liquid Matter Prize from the European Physical Society.

Yeomans was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to physics.

In 2025, Yeomans was awarded the Dirac Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics.

Personal life Yeomans married chemistry professor Peter Hore in 1990.