Before starting university in Oxford, I worked for 8 months in the Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. I finished my D.Phil. at Oxford in 1982, having spent one year in the O.R. Department at Stanford University in California. I then spent three years as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, before returning to England and joining the Numerical Analysis Group in the Computer Science and Systems Division at AEA Harwell.
I moved with the Group to the Central Computing Department (as it was then) at RAL in 1990 and have been there almost ever since. I spent a sabbatical year at CERFACS in Toulouse, France, during 1993.
I am a visiting Professor within the Department of
Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Edinburgh, and at the University of Oxford. I won the Leslie Fox prize in numerical analysis in September 1986, and the Beale-Orchard-Hays prize for excellence in computational mathematical programming in August 1994. In May 2009, I was elected as one of 183 inaugural SIAM Fellows. I have published two books: the first on the software package
LANCELOT in 1992, and the second on
trust-region methods in 2000. I was editor-in-chief of the
SIAM Journal on Optimization from 2005 until 2010, and an associate editor for the
ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, for the
IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, for
Mathematics of Computation, and for
Mathematical Programming, and as well as being an Area Editor for
Mathematical Programming Computation, until 2016.
My research interests are currently on the theory and practice of optimization methods, on numerical linear algebra, on large-scale scientific computation, and on the links between these fields. My other interests include church-bell
ringing,
hill walking, messing about on
canals,
mushroom collecting, and appreciating cask-conditioned
ales of all varieties. I am a long-suffering supporter of
Tottenham Hotspur FC.
In 2006, I was appointed as Professor of Numerical Optimisation and Tutorial Fellow of
Exeter College at the University of Oxford. I returned full-time to RAL in 2008. I became an STFC Senior Fellow in 2011, and have worked half time since the summer of 2017.
