Dr Deryk Osthus has been promoted to the post of Professor in the School of Mathematics.

After graduating from Cambridge in 1997, Deryk Osthus moved to Berlin where he completed a PhD in Computer Science in 2000. In 2003 he was awarded (jointly with D Kühn) the European Prize in Combinatorics, mainly for their work related to graph minors and Hadwiger’s conjecture. In 2004, he moved to Birmingham and (with D Kühn) established a thriving Combinatorics research group. His research interests include random graphs, randomized algorithms, matching problems, as well as cycles in graphs and digraphs. For example, in 2012 Kühn and Osthus proved a conjecture of Kelly (from 1968) on Hamilton decompositions, which also has applications to the Travelling Salesman Problem.