(Academic) Life History
After growing up in Belfast in the 60s and 70s and studying Natural Sciences as an undergraduate at Trinity College Cambridge, I emerged from a PhD in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London in 1986 into a rather bleak Thatcherite landscape. As a consequence I decided to go abroad, first to LPTHE (now LPT) Orsay, near Paris, in 1986-7 then to Caltech in LA in 1987-9. I managed to be in Berlin in 1989, by accident rather than design, at the Free University for a few months while The Berlin Wall came down before rounding off my wanderings at Lancaster University in the northwest of England as a temporary lecturer in physics in 1990.
It occurred to me, belatedly, that I could apply for jobs in mathematics as well as physics, which I did, and ended up as a (maths) lecturer at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh in 1990. I have been there ever since as a senior lecturer, reader and professor apart from a year's leave of absence in 1993-4 as a Marie Curie/HCM (Human Capital and Mobility) Fellow at Orsay again, an in-situ RSE/SOEID Fellowship in 1998-9 and shorter sojourns at the Isaac Newton Institute, the Institut Henri Poincare, the Niels Bohr Institute and Nordita.
Since 2013 I have also been involved with lecturing at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Ghana, Senegal and South Africa.