Profile

I grew up in London on a council estate. When I was 10 we moved to Hertfordshire where I went to secondary school. Since then I have lived in Chelmsford, Cambridge, Oxford, London (again), Sligo, Bristol and Bath. I have also spent a lot of time in Canada, bith working and visiting relatives.

I have been doing both maths and youthwork full on since university and I regard both as equally important to my life. I am also a published poet. My first book was on mountaineering in the West Coast of Ireland which I wrote when I was working as a mountaineering instructor in a youth centre close to Sligo

Some fun facts (?) about me ..

I have shared a taxi with Carol Vorderman, I have appeared on Radio New Zealand talking about parrots, I am a world authority on the maths of dead fish, I once bought my wife a wedding anniversary present from the tank museum gift shop, and my favourite food is the cheese and pickle sandwich.

I work in mathematical modelling and knowledge exchange. This is the process of lookking at a real life problem, converting it into mathematics (usually differential equations), solving the maths, and then using the solution to tell you about the original problem. The knowledge exchange part is the two way communication with industry which is great fyn.

Some appplications of this which I have been working on recently are in weather forecasting, climate change, and COVID-19 planning. (I spoke at the COP climate conference, and have worked with SPI-M which advises the government about COVID-19). However, I am interested in any problem where mathematical modelling can be applied, especially if these problems come from industry. Things that I have worked on include food, electricity, rocks, and saving the whales.

My work on COVID-19 has involved using mathematical modelling to make trains, large events and going to the supermarket or theate safer, and I have collaborated with the Edinburgh Fringe, the Royal Opera House and Shakespeare’s Globe.

What I have described above is a ‘typical day’. But in realist no day is typical. Many days are spent somewhere else often working with industry or with collaborators in an other university, or (since lockdown) with government policy makers.

Research work often involves reading a lot of papers written by other mathematicians, or scientists, formulating a hypothesis, doing a LOT of computer experiments, and also spending hours thinking very hard about problems and often getting nowhere for a long time, but then having big breakthrough moments when you make real progress. For example I spend a lot of time trying to solve the (nonlinear) differential equations which describe how things change, for example either looking at how agriculture in Africa is impacted by Climate change, or in trying to predict the spread of COVID-19.