Dr Robert Leese has been Director of the Smith Institute and a member of its Council since 1999 and Director of the Knowledge Transfer Network for Industrial Mathematics since its establishment in 2005. He previously held Research Fellowships at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and a visiting position at Brown University. Robert holds a PhD in mathematical physics from the University of Durham and has been a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, since 1993. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and a member of the Peer Review College of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Dr Heather Tewkesbury has been Business Development Director at the Smith Institute since 2006, after two years as a Technology Translator and a further three years as Business Development Manager. Previously she worked as Modelling Development Manager for Cadbury Trebor Bassett, applying mathematics across all areas of the business. Heather holds a PhD in modelling heat transfer from the University of Birmingham. She is a Chartered Mathematician and Council Member of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

Dr Tim Boxer has been a Technology Translator with the Smith Institute since 2002 and took on the role of Operations Manager in 2004. Previously, he worked for ArjoWiggins as a Diagnostic Engineer, where he worked on time series and signal analysis, flow through compressible porous media and linear elastic beams. More recently Tim's interests have developed into the areas of probabilistic modelling and decision making under uncertainty. Tim holds a PhD in modelling industrial processes from UMIST, and an MSc in Industrial Applied Mathematics from the University of Southampton.

Dr David Allwright has been a Technology Translator with the Smith Institute since 2000. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge and worked as a Research Fellow on control theory at the Universities of Cambridge and Toronto. David's technical interests then expanded at Topexpress Ltd to include signal processing, acoustics, vibration and other areas of fluid and solid mechanics, and then further, to other wave phenomena and probabilistic and Markov models at the University of Oxford and the Smith Institute.

Tristram Armour has been a Technology Translator with the Smith Institute since 2005. Tristram holds a BA in Mathematics and Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics, both from the University of Cambridge, where he specialised in mathematical modelling for telecommunications, Monte Carlo inference, statistics and applied probability. He worked as a Technology Consultant for Analysys during 2004. More recently Tristram has developed expertise in implementing algorithms.

Dr Melvin Brown has been a Technology Translator with the Smith Institute since 2001. Previously he worked for British Energy, Nuclear Electric, Dowty Fuel Systems and Rolls-Royce, in the areas of sensitivity and uncertainty analysis, failure modes and effects analysis, and dynamic simulation. Melvin holds a PhD in the foundations of quantum mechanics from the University of London, an MSc in Nuclear Reactor Technology from the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and an MSc in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from the University of Liverpool. Melvin is a Chartered Member of the Institute of Physics.

Dr Claudia Centazzo joined the Smith Institute in 2006 as Business Development Manager. Previously she was an Assistant Lecturer at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium. Claudia holds a PhD in category theory from UCL and an MSc in Mathematics from Dalhousie University in Canada. Claudia is the co-author of a book chapter on categorical foundations, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, and she is also fluent in Italian, French and Spanish.

Caroline Edwards has been a Technology Translator with the Smith Institute since 2008. Caroline has recently submitted a PhD thesis in structural topology optimisation and holds an MSc in Modern Applications of Mathematics both from the University of Bath. Caroline’s areas of interest include numerical analysis, linear solver techniques, linear elasticity and finite element modelling.

Dr Vera Hazelwood has been a Technology Translator with the Smith Institute since 2005, and a Business Development Manager since 2007. She holds a PhD in Applied Optics from the University of Southampton, and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Kiev State Shevchenko University. Vera's technical areas of expertise are the mathematical modelling of complex systems, optics of liquid crystals, nonlinear phenomena, numerical methods for solving differential and integral equations and Monte-Carlo techniques. Vera holds an ISEB ISTQB certificate in Software Testing, and won the Institute of Physics prize for Best PhD Thesis in Computational Physics in 2006.