He is Professor of Computational Methods in the Computational Engineering Design Research Group (CED) Group within the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences and is Director of the Microsoft Institute for HPC. He was previously Associate Dean for Enterprise and Chief Information Officer at the University of Southampton.

He has a doctorate in Electronics and Computer Science, degrees in Maths and Physics and currently holds over £5mn in research grants and industrial sponsorship. He has published over 250 papers and regularly speaks at prestigious national and international conferences.

The primary research interests of our research group are in the three broad themed areas of optimisation and design search, applied computational modelling, and computational methods. This spans design optimisation, solid material modelling, computational electromagnetics, repetitive structures, contact mechanics, structural dynamics and computational methods.

His team of PGs and RAs in the Computational Engineering and Design Group is applying and developing high performance computing in a variety of collaborative interdisciplinary computational science and engineering projects. These include computational electromagnetics (photonic devices – which has led to the formation of a successful spin-off company, liquid crystals, superconductors, and electrical impedance tomography), applied computational algorithms (spectral eigenvalue solvers, modelling Antarctica and other ice sheets / ice caps, coastal behaviour, and evolutionary biology), and commercial distributed computing, Cloud Computing and embedded computing. In each of these projects new algorithms are being developed and large-scale computation is being exploited to solve problems in interdisciplinary collaborations. In the Micrsoft Institute for HPC our aim is to demonstrate why, where and how we are exploiting current and future Microsoft tools and technologies to enable engineering and scientific research to deliver faster, cheaper and better results."

He has led a number of the technical procurements for the University of Southampton’s supercomputers, which, following his research in this area, have been based on a commodity cluster of PCs. He is or has been involved in industrial collaborations with Microsoft, DERA, Intel, BAE Systems, BAE Systems, Airbus and Rolls-Royce, with research funding from EPSRC, NERC, DTI, TSB, and industry. He was Founder and Chief Scientist of dezineforce which delivered Cloud-based optimization and design search capability for engineering and science over the web. Its Intellectual property was sold in May 2011.