Executive Committee biographies

Nigel Campbell retired from the civil service in June 2022 after a career of 32+ years, including 22+ years as a senior civil servant (including equivalent roles at Transport for London and the NHS). He joined HM Treasury as a statistician after BA Maths and MSc Statistics degrees at Oxford. He subsequently became an economist, following an MSc in Economics at the London School of Economics.

Nigel spent most of his career as an economist and/or a policy adviser. He was Chief Analyst of the Prime Minister’s Implementation Unit (Cabinet Office); Director, Policy Analysis, Transport for London; and Head of Delivery Analysis and Covid Data at Defra. He has always enjoyed helping to ensure analysis and mathematical sciences improve public policy and delivery. Mathematical sciences have underpinned almost all of Nigel’s career. He retired because he wanted to spend more time teaching, coaching and mentoring.

Nigel is Adjunct Professor at the University of Southampton. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Royal Statistical Society.

He is excited at the prospect of the mathematical sciences having a single, unified, persuasive voice through a National Academy for Mathematical Sciences. He is hugely looking forward to being chair of the executive committee for this set-up phase.

Sophie Carr is the founder and owner of Bays Consulting and is Vice President of the Royal Statistical Society for Education and Statistical Literacy. She serves on the General Council of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and was named the World’s Most Interesting Mathematician, 2019. Sophie trained and worked as an aeronautical engineer, during which time she completed her PhD in Bayesian Belief Networks. Throughout her career she has had first-hand experience of the importance of bringing together different mathematical disciplines to encourage cross-fertilisation of ideas and knowledge exchange to deliver the best possible solution.

Education

Nira Chamberlain is Mathematical Modelling Technical Fellow for Atkins, a member SNC-Lavalin Group, and is also a Visiting Professor at Loughborough University. With over 30 years’ experience of mathematical modelling, simulation, and developing algorithms that solve complex engineering and commercial problems, Nira was the President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications from 2020 to 2021 and will be the President of The Mathematical Association in 2023. In 2018, Nira was the winner of the Big Math Off title “World’s Most Interesting Mathematician” and is currently the Chair of the Black Heroes of Mathematics Conference.  Nira is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and of the Operational Research Society and was awarded an OBE for services to mathematical sciences in 2022.

Practitioner affairs and knowledge exchange

Tom Coates is a Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College London, working in algebraic geometry, scientific computation, and machine learning. He co-leads a research group that is building a Periodic Table for shapes, by combining new methods in geometry with cluster-scale computation, data mining, and machine learning.  Tom has won numerous prizes and awards including the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Whitehead Prize, and the Adams Prize. He is currently on part-time secondment to the Office of the Chief Scientific Adviser.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Christine Currie is Professor of Operational Research at the University of Southampton and a member of the Centre for Operational Research, Management Sciences and Information Systems (CORMSIS), a large research centre that spans Mathematical Sciences and Southampton Business School. She works closely with business and the public sector to carry out research into problems of decision-making and optimisation under uncertainty. Christine is Chair of the OR Society’s Research Committee, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Newton Gateway, the Isaac Newton Institute’s knowledge exchange centre, and one of the co-authors of the Green Paper for a National Academy for Mathematical Sciences.

Practitioner affairs and knowledge exchange (Lead)

Academic affairs

Ineke De Moortel is a Professor of applied mathematics (Solar Physics) in the School of Mathematics and Statistics and AVP Dean of Science at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the dynamical processes occurring in the Sun’s atmosphere, in particular coronal heating and coronal seismology and she investigates the behaviour and interaction of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves and oscillations in 3D geometries, using observations, numerical simulations and analytical modelling. Ineke was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) in 2015, and previously co-chaired its affiliate society, the RSE Young Academy of Scotland from 2012 to 2014. She was President of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society from 2017 to 2019.

Governance

Cathy Hobbs is Academic Dean for the Faculty of Engineering, Environment and Computing at Coventry University. Her background is in Singularity Theory and its applications to the physical sciences. She has been Chair of Heads of Departments of Mathematical Sciences Committee (HoDoMS), and on the Councils of the London Mathematical Society and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications. Currently she is one of the Vice Presidents of the London Mathematical Society having previously Chaired its Women in Mathematics Committee.

Education

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Ruth Kaufman is currently Chair of the EURO [Operational Research] Practitioners’ Forum, Chair of the OR Society’s Pro Bono Steering Group, and is active in a number of other non-OR Board roles. Her career was spent in OR practice and other senior management functions in the public sector. Past roles include President of the OR Society, Chair of the Government OR Service, Chair of the Heads of OR Forum, and Head of OR, Strategy and Change at the government’s Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD). She is a Companion of OR, and a Fellow of the OR Society and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. She was awarded an OBE for services to OR in 2016.

Academic affairs

Practitioner affairs and knowledge exchange

Sara Lombardo is Professor of Mathematics and Dean of the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University and a member of the Maxwell Institute for Mathematical Sciences. Her research concerns integrable systems, a lively area of mathematics that brings together algebra, analysis and geometry to tackle fundamental problems often motivated by mathematical physics. Her work spans from the study of certain types of equivariant infinite dimensional algebras to the modelling of nonlinear wave phenomena. Sara chairs the EPSRC Strategy Advisory Team for Mathematical Sciences (2022-2024) and the London Mathematical Society Committee for Women and Diversity in Mathematics and is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

Policy

Terry Lyons is Wallis Professor Emeritus and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He is currently Principal Investigator of the EPSRC-funded DataSig program and of the complementary research programme CIMDA-Oxford. He was a founding member and Director of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance and was president of the London Mathematical Society from 2013 to 2015. His seminal contribution to mathematics was the development of the theory of rough paths and he was awarded the Rollo Davidson Prize in 1985 and the Pólya Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2000. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Learned Society of Wales and also of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Jil Matheson served as National Statistician, Head of the Government Statistical Service and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority from 2009 until her retirement in 2014. Her current activities include: Hon Secretary of the Academy of Social Sciences, member of the Royal Society’s Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education, member UK Committee on Research Integrity, and non-executive director of the Sports Ground Safety Authority. She has, and continues to, advise various Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and other programmes. She is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.

Governance

Lynne McClure trained as a secondary maths teacher and has worked in all phases of education including as Head of a small primary school. She led Initial Teacher Training (ITT) courses at Edinburgh and Oxford Brookes Universities, has managed her own international education consultancy, and has written many books, articles and research papers. Having directed projects including Cambridge Mathematics, Underground Maths and Nrich, Lynne is currently Head of Mathematics Solutions within the Cambridge Partnership for Education. She has been a member of the Royal Society’s Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (ACME), President of the Mathematical Association and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and the Royal Society of Arts. Lynne sits on the Royal Society’s Mathematical Futures Board and Partnerships Grants Committee, and is a Trustee of National Numeracy.

Bernard Silverman is a statistician whose research has ranged widely across theoretical and practical aspects of statistics, especially computational statistics, researching the ways that computing power has changed our ability to collect, analyse, understand and utilise data. He has held chairs at Bath, Bristol, Oxford and Nottingham Universities, and has collaborated in many areas of science, industry and government. He was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Home Office 2010-2017 and is now Chair of the Geospatial Commission. His other current roles include work on modern slavery, security, official statistics, and science and technology for policy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and was knighted in 2018 “For Public Service and services to Science”.

Simon Yun-Farmbrough is Chair of Governors of the University of Bedfordshire. He started his career at the Boston Consulting Group where he was a Partner, was Group Director of Strategy at Prudential plc, and subsequently Co-Founder and Vice Chairman of Fenchurch Advisory Partners, a leading City-based corporate finance business. Simon is a member of the Investment Committee of the Royal Society. He graduated with First Class Honours in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge and subsequently studied Economics as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University. He was also a member of the 1976 UK International Maths Olympiad team.