Philip Maini

Philip Kumar Maini (born 16 October 1959 in Magherafelt, Northern Ireland) is a Northern Irish mathematician. Since 1998, he has been the Professor of Mathematical Biology at the University of Oxford and is the head of the Centre for Mathematical Biology in the Mathematical Institute.

Education

Maini was educated at Rainey Endowed School in County Londonderry and Balliol College, Oxford where he was awarded a BA in 1982 and a DPhil in 1985, the latter for a thesis modelling morphogenetic pattern formation supervised by James D. Murray

Research and career

After various postdoctoral research and teaching positions at Oxford and the University of Utah, he became director of the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology in 1998, then Statutory Professor in Mathematical Biology and professorial fellow of St John’s College, Oxford in 2005.

Maini's research includes mathematical modelling of tumours, wound healing and embryonic pattern formation, and the theoretical analysis of these models. His research has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). He has supervised 53 PhD students.

Maini gave an invited talk at ICM 2010 in Hyderabad, speaking on "Modelling Aspects of Tumour Technology."

Awards and honours

Maini was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015. His certificate of election reads:

Philip Maini's mathematical and computational modelling of spatiotemporal processes in biology and medicine has led to significant scientific advances in both. His work on biological pattern formation has led to detailed understanding of the roles of noise, domain growth and gradients in pattern generation. He has generalised the concept of gradient information and has proposed an experimentally consistent resolution of the chemotactic wave paradox. He has developed multiscale models for wound healing and for vascular tumour growth. He has thereby elucidated the underlying mechanisms by which particular growth factors reduce scar formation and has provided detailed insight into the design of combination cancer therapy.

Maini was an elected member of the boards of the Society for Mathematical Biology and the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the Society of Biology, and is a corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. He has held visiting positions at universities worldwide.

Maini co-authored a 1997 Bellman Prize-winning paper and received a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship and Wolfson Research Merit Award, and the London Mathematical Society Naylor Prize.