About us
The CMB embodies mathematicians, physicists and biologists from different fields, emphasising lively and multidisciplinary teamwork with other research groups within the university, the UK and abroad. Besides the director, Professor Philip K. Maini, and two full-time faculty members, Dr Ruth E. Baker and Dr Eamonn Gaffney, it presently has thirteen graduate students, four postdoctoral researchers and a number of affiliated faculty. It also has a lively visitor programme with an average of between 10 to 15 visitors per year, all self-funded or on joint grants held with the CMB.
Our research encompasses areas as diverse as modelling social insect behaviour, tumour dynamics, wound healing, pattern formation and signalling in developmental biology, bacterial chemotaxis, regional dynamics of plants, medical imaging, gene delivery, imaging and mechanics of sperm dynamics and muco-ciliary dynamics. Within the University of Oxford, we conduct research in collaboration with the departments of Biochemistry, Clinical Pharmacology, Engineering, Physiology, Physics, Plant Sciences and Zoology, as well as the Department of Computer Science, Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (OCIAM) and Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. In many cases, grants are held jointly with collaborators and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are jointly supervised.
Within Oxford, the CMB is part of the £8.4m BBSRC/EPSRC Oxford Centre for Integrative Systems Biology (OCISB), the £4m EPSRC/BBSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Systems Biology and one of the core groups of the $25m KAUST-funded Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics (OCCAM). As well as these major grants, over the past 3 years, research at the CMB has been funded by grants from the Nuffield Trust, NERC, London Mathematical Society, Physiological Society, Wellcome Trust, Royal Society, Microsoft, Lloyd's Tercentenary Foundation, and the Australian Government, Department of Science, Education and Training. The CMB is also a member of the "CABDyN" (Complex-Agent Based Dynamical Networks) research cluster.
The CMB has extensive national and international collaborations. Research collaborators at the national level include colleagues from Birmingham University School of Medicine, the Birmingham Women's Hospital Assisted Conception Unit, the universities of Manchester, Nottingham, Southampton, Sheffield and Sussex. At the international level, there are on-going joint projects with colleagues in Australia (Queensland University of Technology, University of Melbourne), Belgium, France (Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology), Hong Kong, Italy, Japan (Chubu and Kyoto universities), South Korea (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Taiwan, and the USA (University of Arizona, University of Southern California, Indiana University, Stowers Institute for Medical Research, Kansas City, Princeton University, University of Notre Dame).
The CMB encompasses the Editorial Office of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology (published by Springer), which is the journal of the Society for Mathematical Biology.