Gianne Derks was invited to speak at SPT2014 and also gave the opening talk  on Monday morning.  SPT2014 took place in Cala Conone (Sardinia, Italy) from 25 May to 1 June. The conference is part of a series of conferences on “Symmetry and Perturbation Theory” that have been running since 1996. The website for SPT2014 is here.  Gianne spoke on “Stability of stationary fronts in inhomogeneous wave equations”.  An abstract follows:  models describing waves in anisotropic media or media with imperfections usually have inhomogeneous terms.  This talk considers the effects of (non-local) inhomogeneities on fronts and solitary waves in nonlinear wave equations.   Wave equations with finite length inhomogeneities and the assumption that the spatial domain can be written as the union of disjoint intervals are considered, such that on each interval the wave equation is homogeneous.  The underlying Hamiltonian structure allows for a rich family of stationary front solutions and the values of the energy (Hamiltonian) in each intermediate interval provide natural parameters for the family of  orbits. In this talk, necessary and sufficient criterion are given for the change of stability. The results are illustrated with an example related to a Josephson junction system with a finite length inhomogeneity associated with  variations in the Josephson tunnelling critical current.