Biography
After growing up in Belfast and studying Natural Sciences at Trinity College Cambridge, I emerged from a PhD in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College in 1986 into a rather bleak Thatcherite landscape.
At this point I decided to go abroad, first to LPTHE Orsay near Paris in 1986-1987, then to Caltech in 1987-1989. I managed to be in Berlin in 1989 at the Free University for a few months while the wall came down before rounding off my wanderings in Lancaster as a temporary lecturer in physics in 1990.
It occurred to me that I could apply for jobs in mathematics as well as physics, which I did, and ended up as a lecturer at Heriot-Watt in 1990. I have been here ever since as a senior lecturer, reader and professor apart from a year's leave of absence in 1993-1994 as a Marie Curie Fellow at Orsay again and shorter sojourns at the Institut Henri Poincare, the Niels Bohr Institute and Nordita.
Since 2013 I have been involved with lecturing at AIMS (African Institute of Mathematical Sciences) in Ghana, Senegal and South Africa.
More information can be found at https://www.professordes.uk