The staff
Our staff set themselves apart through their outstanding technical skills in the mathematical sciences, coupled to an uncompromising focus on client requirements. With a dual emphasis on technical excellence and professional delivery, we have broad experience in successfully designing and managing complex projects. We invest in building effective working relationships, from briefing business leaders and senior management to working closely alongside our clients’ own project teams.
Start a conversation
If you’d like to work with, or just talk to, any of our fantastic staff click below to get the conversation started.
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Dr Paul Munday
Technical staff MMath DPhil
Dr Paul Munday joined the Smith Institute in 2010.
Previously he worked for the civil service as a mathematical modeller. He holds a DPhil in Statistics and an MMath degree, both from the University of Oxford.
Paul is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and his areas of interest include statistical inference and stochastic modelling.
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Dr Tim Boxer
Project Manager, Technical staff MSc PhD
Dr Tim Boxer joined the Smith Institute in 2002.
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.
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Dr Vera Hazelwood
Project manager, Business Development Manager, Technical staff MSc PhD PhD
Dr Vera Hazelwood joined the Smith Institute in 2005. 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 a PRINCE2™ Practitioner qualification in project management, an ISEB ISTQB certificate in Software Testing, and won the Institute of Physics prize for Best PhD Thesis in Computational Physics in 2006. Vera was awarded Best Newcomer in the 2010 Impact Awards for her role in managing the expansion of Industrial Maths Internships and in September 2012 was appointed to the Chair of the IoP's Computational Physics Group Committee.
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Dr Heather Tewkesbury
Business Development Director BSc PhD FIMA
Dr Heather Tewkesbury joined the Smith Institute in 2001, has been Business Development Director since 2006 and a member of Council since 2010.
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, Fellow and Vice President of Professional Affairs at the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.
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Dr Zoë Lawson
Technical Staff, BSc PhD
Dr Zoë Lawson joined the Smith Institute in 2012.
Previously she worked at Cardiff University, as a Lecturer in Statistics for the School of Mathematics and as a Research Associate and Statistician for the School of Medicine. Prior to this, Zoë worked as a Senior Decision Science Analyst at HBOS plc., building models for credit risk and marketing.
Zoë holds a PhD in modelling the progression of treatment scenarios in the HIV/AIDS epidemic from Cardiff University. Her research interests include areas of modelling, operational research, and medical and forensic statistics.
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Dr Robert Leese
Director MA PhD FIMA
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.
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Dr David Allwright
Technical staff BA PhD
Dr David Allwright joined the Smith Institute in 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.
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Dr Caroline Edwards
Business Development Manager, Technical staff MSc PhD MIMA
Dr Caroline Edwards joined the Smith Institute in 2008.
Caroline holds a PhD in structural topology optimisation and 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.
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Dr Chris Cawthorn
Technical staff MMath PhD
Dr Chris Cawthorn joined the Smith Institute in 2011.
He previously worked for HR Wallingford as a scientist, developing and supporting the TELEMAC modelling system for free surface fluid flows.
Chris holds a PhD in granular continuum mechanics and an MMath degree, both from the University of Cambridge. His principal areas of interest include scientific computation, continuum modelling and numerical analysis.
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Lorcan Mac Manus
Project manager, Technical staff BAI BA MSc
Lorcan Mac Manus joined the Smith Institute in 2009.
Previously he worked as a Research Associate in the Computer Laboratory of Cambridge University on a Panasonic sponsored project; as a research and development engineer in a speech recognition group in Autonomy; as a Lecturer in the Dublin Institute of Technology and as a research and development engineer in Analog Devices.
His research interests are in statistical signal processing and his work has focused primarily on speech, music and image processing. Lorcan attended Trinity College, Dublin where he received BAI and BA degrees and a research Masters degree in Electronic Engineering.
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Dr Claudia Centazzo
Business Development Manager MSc PhD
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.
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Dr Melvin Brown
Quality Manager, Technical staff MSc MSc PhD
Dr Melvin Brown joined the Smith Institute in 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.
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Dr Owen Jones
Technical Staff, MMath PhD
Dr Owen Jones joined the Smith Institute in October 2012.
Previously he worked for the civil service as a mathematician. He holds a PhD in Number Theory from Imperial College London and an MMath from the University of Cambridge.His areas of interest include number theory and optimisation.