Rate My Professor Philip Maini

Philip Maini is the Statutory Professor of Mathematical Biology at the University of Oxford and Director of the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology in the Mathematical Institute. He graduated with a BA in mathematics from Balliol College, Oxford in 1982 and completed his DPhil in 1985 under the supervision of James D. Murray, with a thesis on mechanochemical models for morphogenetic pattern formation. After postdoctoral work at Oxford and an associate professorship at the University of Utah, he returned to Oxford in 1990 as a university lecturer in mathematical biology and tutorial fellow at Brasenose College. He was appointed director of the Wolfson Centre in 1998 and Statutory Professor of Mathematical Biology with a professorial fellowship at St John’s College in 2005.

Maini’s research focuses on mathematical modelling of spatiotemporal processes in developmental biology and disease, including tumours, wound healing and embryonic pattern formation. He has supervised 53 PhD students and served as editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology from 2002 to 2015. He delivered an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010. Maini was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He received the London Mathematical Society Naylor Prize and Lectureship in 2009, the Society for Mathematical Biology Arthur T. Winfree Prize in 2017 and the Royal Society Sylvester Medal in 2024. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Royal Society of Biology, among other honours.