He obtained a degree in maths from the University of Bristol (1981) and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Dundee (1983), after which followed a short period of post doctoral research in dynamical systems and nonlinear PDEs at Dundee.
He was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for services to mathematics R&Doctorate. He is a former president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the United Kingdom"s professional and learned society for mathematicians (2006-2008). He began working in the theory and application of reaction diffusion equations. Between 1984 and 1989 he worked at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, largely on both applications of modelling within physiology and biology.
In 1989 he joined a commercial consulting company working in the environmental sciences, building up a mathematical modelling group on multidisciplinary projects in the United Kingdom, Europe, United States and Japan.
His research ranged from the application of fractals to simulating subsurface environments (micro medium structure controlling channelling flow and dispersion phenomena at the macroscopic scale), and non-linear multiphase (solutes, gases, and especially colloidal) dispersion processes, fully coupled chemical-temperature–hydration systems, through to the development of frameworks for estimating uncertainties within risk assessments, and the analysis of public risk perception. The need to extract structure and information, rapidly, and exhaustively, from large commercial data sets drove this.
He worked with all of the major grocery retailers in the United Kingdom and their largest suppliers. Numbercraft, designed as a five-year project, was acquired by Lawson Software (Street Paul, United States) in 2003.
He has developed models and methods for analyzing large networks (range dependent random graphs) occurring within the biosciences, such as in genome, proteome and metabolome interactions.
He is interested in applications of mathematics to phenomena in the Digital Economy, and within neurodynamics. He is working on methods for analysing very large and evolving graphs/networks, including forecasting, inference and intervention problems. These have applications to large communication (telco, email social) networks - especially in monitoring marketing and intervention applications (including Connecticut, cyber, and radicalisation modelling)
He is a Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford (since 2013).
He was born in Oxford in 1959, and has a twin bother, Simon.
He lives in Henley on Thames. His Who"s Who entry says he supports Manchester United, and plays the guitar.
He also has two dogs, a liver-spotted dalmatian called Rosie (he calls Limpy) and a Rhodesian ridgeback called Bella (he calls Cheeky Monkey).
He is a former member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Council (2000-2004) and chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council"s User Panel. He is also former member of Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Council (2009-2013).
He is an independent member of the Ministry of Defence DSAC (since 2008).
