Professor David Smith PhD FIMA

Professor David Smith

School of Mathematics
Professor of Applied Mathematics

Contact details

Telephone
+44 (0) 121 414 7374
Fax
+44 (0) 121 414 3389
Email
d.j.smith@bham.ac.uk
Twitter
@DaveDysonSmith
View my research portal
Address
School of Mathematics
Watson Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Dave Smith is Professor of Applied Mathematics and School Director of Research.

He is author or co-author of approximately 50 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: https://github.com/djsmithbham. He has received funding for his research from EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC, STFC and Wellcome Trust. From October 2018, Dave will be a Turing Fellow with the Alan Turing Institute.

Dave’s main research areas are sperm motility biofluiddynamics, working alongside Centre for Human Reproductive Science, Birmingham Women’s Hospital (Science Lead Dr Jackson Kirkman-Brown) with team members Dr Meurig Gallagher and Dr Gemma Cupples, and modelling the synthetic biology nanofiber M13 bacteriophage, working with Dr Rosemary Dyson, Dr Kenton Arkill (Nottingham), Prof Tim Dafforn and Dr Matt Hicks (Linear Diagnostics Ltd). Wider collaboration related to these projects includes Dr Hermes Gadelha (York) and Prof Eamonn Gaffney (Oxford).

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 (Cambridge) 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 Centre for Computational Biology, working with scientists and medics ranging from cancer diagnosis to plastic surgery and endocrinology. Collaborative work includes modelling T cell reconstitution following stem cell transplant (with Prof Paul Moss’s group), modelling antibiotic resistance (with Dr Sara Jabbari), and adrenal steroid metabolism (with Prof Wiebke Arlt’s group, Prof Peter Tino and Dr Kerstin Bunte). A key feature of all of the above projects is the integration of mathematical modelling with complex experimental data.

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 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. 

School server web page: web.mat.bham.ac.uk/D.Smith

Qualifications

  • PhD Applied Mathematics, University of Birmingham, June 2006
  • BA (Hons I), Mathematical Sciences, University of Oxford, July 2000

Biography

Dave qualified with a BA (Hons) from the University of Oxford in 2000. In 2001 he began studying for a PhD at the University of Birmingham, inspired by emerging links between Applied Mathematics and the School of Medicine. Dave completed his PhD in 2005 (graduating the following year), leading to several publications on the mechanics of airway defence, and the role of fluid mechanics in early embryo development.

Following his PhD, Dave received funding from the Wellcome Trust Value in People Fellowship scheme, enabling him to begin working with colleagues at Birmingham Women’s Hospital and Medical School on studying how human sperm swim, from a combined mathematical and experimental perspective. This led to an MRC Training Fellowship, and subsequently a Birmingham Science City Fellowship.

In December 2009, Dave was appointed lecturer in the School of Mathematics, and combines collaborative research both within the department, cross-college and with other universities, with teaching and management responsibilities, including Master’s programme development.

In 2015 Dave was promoted to Senior Lecturer and became Head of the Applied Mathematics research group, and in 2017 Dave was promoted to Professor of Applied Mathematics. He is currently School Director of Research.

Teaching

  • Single Honours Mathematics (G100, G103, G141)
  • Mathematics Majors: Mathematics with Business Management (G1N2); Mathematics with Engineering (J920); Mathematics with Philosophy (G1V5)
  • Joint Honours Mathematics: Mathematics & Computer Science (GG14); Pure Mathematics & Computer Science (GGC4); Mathematics & Sport Science (GC17); Mathematics & Music (GW13); Mathematics & Philosophy (GV15)
  • Theoretical Physics and Applied Mathematics (FG31)
  • Mathematics Minors: French Studies and Mathematics (GR11); German Studies and Mathematics (GR12)
  • Natural Sciences (CFG0, FCG0)
  • MSc Mathematical Modelling

Postgraduate supervision

  • Lead supervisor of two PhD students
  • Co-supervisor of two PhD students

I am very happy to discuss PhD project supervision in Mathematical Biology and Viscous Fluid Dynamics with highly-qualified candidates.

Research

RESEARCH THEMES

  • Cell motility, particularly sperm swimming
  • Modelling embryonic development
  • Biological viscous fluid mechanics
  • Biomedical modelling

RESEARCH ACTIVITY

Mathematical and computational modelling of biological systems, with a focus on microscale mechanical processes.

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Schuech, R, Hoehfurtner, T, Smith, D & Humphries, S 2019, 'Motile curved bacteria are Pareto-optimal' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 116, no. 29, pp. 14440–14447. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1818997116

Tyrrell, J, Smith, D & Dyson, R 2019, 'Regularized Stokeslet rings -- an efficient method for axisymmetric Stokes flow, with application to the growing pollen tube' Physical Review Fluids.

Gallagher, MT, Cupples, G, Ooi, EH, Kirkman-Brown, J & Smith, D 2019, 'Rapid sperm capture: High-throughput flagellar waveform analysis' Human Reproduction.

Kerr, R, Thomson, W & Smith, D 2019, 'Mathematical modelling of the vitamin C clock reaction' Royal Society Open Science, vol. 6, no. 4, 181367. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181367

Gallagher, MT, Wain, R, Dari, S, Whitty, J & Smith, D 2019, 'Non-identifiability of parameters for a class of shear-thinning rheological models, with implications for haematological fluid dynamics' Journal of Biomechanics, vol. 85, pp. 230-238. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbiomech.2019.01.036

Gallagher, MT, Choudhuri, D & Smith, D 2019, 'Sharp quadrature error bounds for the nearest-neighbor discretization of the regularized stokeslet boundary integral equation' SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. B139–B152. https://doi.org/10.1137/18M1191816

Thomson, W, Jabbari, S, Taylor, AE, Arlt, W & Smith, D 2019, 'Simultaneous parameter estimation and variable selection via the logit-normal continuous analogue of the spike-and-slab prior' Journal of The Royal Society Interface, vol. 16, no. 150, 20180572, pp. 20180572. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2018.0572

Solowiej-Wedderburn, J, Smith, D, Lopes, S & Montenegro-Johnson, T 2019, 'Wall stress enhanced exocytosis of extracellular vesicles as a possible mechanism of left-right symmetry-breaking in vertebrate development' Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 460, pp. 220-226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.10.015

Smith, D, Montenegro-Johnson, T & Lopes, S 2019, 'Symmetry-Breaking Cilia-Driven Flow in Embryogenesis' Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, vol. 51, pp. 105-128. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-fluid-010518-040231, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-fluid-010518-040231

Cupples, G, Dyson, RJ & Smith, DJ 2018, 'On viscous propulsion in active transversely isotropic media' Journal of Fluid Mechanics, vol. 855, pp. 408-420. https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2018.647

Bunte, K, Smith, D, Chappell, MJ, Hassan-Smith, Z, Tomlinson, J, Arlt, W & Tino, P 2018, 'Learning pharmacokinetic models for in vivo glucocorticoid activation' Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 455, pp. 222-231. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.07.025

Holloway, C, Cupples, G, Smith, D, Green, JEF, Clarke, RJ & Dyson, R 2018, 'Influences of transversely-isotropic rheology and translational diffusion on the stability of active suspensions' Royal Society Open Science, vol. 5, no. 8, 180456. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.180456

Wain, RAJ, Smith, DJ, Hammond, DR & Whitty, JPM 2018, 'Influence of microvascular sutures on shear strain rate in realistic pulsatile flow' Microvascular Research, vol. 118, pp. 69-81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mvr.2018.03.001

Dyson, R, Smith, D & Holloway, C 2018, 'Linear Rayleigh-Benard stability of a transversely-isotropic fluid' European Journal of Applied Mathematics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956792518000359

Ishimoto, K, Gadelha, H, Gaffney, E, Smith, D & Kirkman-Brown, J 2018, 'Human sperm swimming in a high viscosity mucus analogue' Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 446, pp. 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.02.013

View all publications in research portal

Expertise

Dave Smith is Professor of Applied Mathematics; his research focuses on how mathematics can be used to improve healthcare, through the development of new diagnoses and improved treatments, and also through helping biomedical researchers build quantitative understanding of complex systems that underlie disease. Particular areas of involvement include male fertility via collaboration with Centre for Human Reproductive Science, Birmingham Women’s Hospital, and endocrine disorder, via collaboration with Institute for Metabolism and Systems Research, University of Birmingham. He works as a college member and review panellist for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, mainly contributing in the area of Healthcare Technologies Research.