Rate My Professor Mike Bonsall

Professor Mike Bonsall is Professor of Mathematical Biology in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at St Peter’s College. He completed his undergraduate degree, PhD in Insect Population Dynamics in 1997, and a Royal Society research fellowship in the Department of Biological Sciences at Imperial College London before joining Oxford. His research focuses on applications of mathematics to problems in the life sciences, with particular interests in population biology including population dynamics, community ecology, and evolutionary ecology. Research in his group examines topics such as the population and evolutionary dynamics of life history strategies including the evolution of longevity, the role of spatial structure on shared enemy and competing enemy interactions, the effects of enrichment on the diversity of ecological communities, the interplay between noise and dynamics in multispecies interactions, and the evolution of resistance to microbes. Many projects combine theoretical models with experiments or observations in the field or laboratory to test ecological and evolutionary theories by fitting mathematical models to data.

Professor Bonsall has contributed to science policy, serving as a member of DEFRA’s Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment from 2007 to 2016 and working with the European Food Safety Authority. He participated in producing a 2014 WHO guidance framework on testing GM mosquitoes through involvement with WHO TDR and FNIH, and served as science advisor to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee in 2015, contributing to a report on GM insects. He is involved with academic management teams on several doctoral training programmes at Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society. He leads the Mathematical Ecology Research Group and has held the position of Associate Head (Education) for the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division.