Professor Kevin Burrage

Biography

Background

Professor Burrage completed his PhD in Computational Mathematics from the University of Auckland in 1978. In his early academic years he was at the University of Auckland (NZ), the University of Sussex (UK), the University of Liverpool (UK). In 1991 he was appointed to the Chair of Computational Mathematics the University of Queensland.  He established the Advanced Computational Modelling Centre at the University of Queensland in 1995 and was Director of that  centre for 12 years.  He was also the founding CEO of the Queensland Parallel Supercomputing Facility in 1999. He was awarded a Federation Fellowship of the Australian Research Council from 2003-2008. In 2008 he was made Professor of Computational Systems Biology in the Computational Biology group  within both the Department of Computer Science and  the Centre for Integrative Systems Biology  at the University of Oxford. He had this position until October 2015. He shared his time between Oxford and as Professor of Computational Mathematics at QUT, from  2010 until 2015 and  continues in this role at QUT. He was made a Visiting Professor to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford from 2016 to 2019. His current research interests are in Computational Mathematics and Computational Biology.

Research Interests

Professor Burrage’s main research interests are in the fields of Computational Mathematics, Computational Biology and Systems Biology. He made his first contribution to the field of the numerical solution of differential equations in 1978 and has over 250 peer reviewed journal publications, with over 10,000 citations and an H index of 55. He has written a book on Parallel and Sequential methods for Ordinary Differential Equations (OUP 1995). He became interested in the modelling of heterogeneity in biological applications ten years ago and has written a number of papers on this. In particular, since being at Oxford he has worked with clinicians and physiologists in heart modelling to explore the effects of human heart disease through mathematical models.

Contribution

Professor Burrage has attracted over $30Million dollars in competitive research funds within Australia since 1994. In the last ten years Professor Burrage has made significant contributions in the field of Computational and Systems Biology (with a focus on the role of noise in Biological systems in his Federation Fellowship). In this setting, Professor Burrage has addressed challenging problems in genetic regulation and cellular kinetics through sophisticated stochastic multi-scaled modelling and simulation incorporating intrinsic and extrinsic noise. His Computational Biology research has appeared in journals with high impact factors, such as Nature Genetics (24.695), PNAS (10.452), Molecular and Cellular Biology (7.822), PLOS Computational Biology (6), BMC Bioinformatics (5.423), Bioinformatics (6.019), Biophysical Journal (4.585), Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (4.551), Proteins (4.429) and the Journal of Chemical Physics (3.105).

Recognition and achievement

Professor Burrage was awarded (in conjunction with the Queensland Department of Primary Industries) the Federal Government Gold Technology Productivity Award for high performance computing software environment for drought modelling in 1994. More recently he was part of both the ARC Centre in Bioinformatics and the ARC Centre for Complex Systems. He is now a CI in the ARC Centre of Excellence ACEMS. From 2003-2008 he was a Federation Fellow of the ARC. In 2004-2005 he was the Oliver Smithies Fellow to Balliol College, Oxford – a prestigious appointment which has included Nobel Prize winners as past fellows. In 2013 he was made an Honorary Fellowship of the European Society of Computational Methods in Sciences, Engineering and Technology, for outstanding contributions in Computational Mathematics. In 2017 he was made the Crawford Miller Visiting Fellow to  St. Cross College, Oxford