Professor David Smith BA PhD FIMA

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Dave Smith is Professor of Applied Mathematics.

He is author or co-author of around 70 research papers in scientific journals, including in the Internationally-leading publications Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A. Research software developed by his team can be found here. He is currently supported by an EPSRC Healthcare Technologies Challenge Award and has received funding for his research from EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC, Alan Turing Institute, STFC and Wellcome Trust

Dave’s main research areas are numerical methods, image analysis and experiment relevant to sperm motility bio-fluid dynamics, working alongside Centre for Human Reproductive Science, Birmingham Women’s Hospital (Science Lead Prof. Jackson Kirkman-Brown) with collaborator Dr Meurig Gallagher; wider collaborations include joint work with Professor Gerhard van der Horst and colleagues (University of the Western Cape).

Another central area of interest is the related problem of how cilia shape the development of the growing embryo. Dave collaborates with Dr Susana Lopes (Lisbon, Portugal), Dr Tom Montenegro-Johnson (Birmingham) and Dr Kathy Hentges (Manchester) on imaging cilia motility and fluid mechanics in early embryo development. As a keen multidisciplinary collaborator, Dave is an affiliate to the Institute for Metabolism and Systems Research and Systems Modelling for Quantitative Biomedicine, working with scientists and medics ranging from cancer diagnosis to plastic surgery and endocrinology. Current collaborative work includes adrenal steroid metabolism (with Prof. Wiebke Arlt, Prof. Peter Tino and Dr Kerstin Bunte), improving antithyroid therapy (with Prof. Neil Gittoes, Dr Zaki Hassan-Smith and Dr Meurig Gallagher), non-Newtonian fluid dynamics of blood (with Dr Justin Whitty), DNA imaging analysis (with Dr Rob Neely), and the application of surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy in trauma medicine (with Prof. Pola Goldberg-Oppenheimer). A key feature of all of the above projects is the integration of mathematical modelling with complex experimental data. Industrial collaborations include work with Procter & Gamble (with Dr Sara Jabbari) and Linear Diagnostics Ltd (with Dr Rosemary Dyson, Dr Matt Hicks and Prof. Tim Dafforn).

Dave is an enthusiastic communicator of applied mathematics and biological modelling, and provides talks to young people on this subject, including recent school and college visits, and organises IMA West Midlands Branch talks at the University of Birmingham. He convenes the fortnightly international BioActive Fluids seminar, part of the UK Fluids Network's special interest group in Biologically Active Fluids.

He has lectured a range of undergraduate material, from 1st year Probability and Combinatorics to masters-level Numerical Methods in Linear Algebra, Viscous Flow and Computational Methods.