After growing up in Belfast and studying Natural Sciences at Trinity College Cambridge, I emerged from a PhD in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College in 1986 into a rather bleak Thatcherite landscape.

At this point I decided to go abroad, first to LPTHE Orsay near Paris in 1986-1987, then to Caltech in 1987-1989. I managed to be in Berlin in 1989 at the Free University for a few months while the wall came down before rounding off my wanderings in Lancaster as a temporary lecturer in physics in 1990.

It occurred to me that I could apply for jobs in mathematics as well as physics, which I did, and ended up as a lecturer at Heriot-Watt in 1990. I have been here ever since as a senior lecturer, reader and professor apart from a year's leave of absence in 1993-1994 as a Marie Curie Fellow at Orsay again and shorter sojourns at the Institut Henri Poincare, the Niels Bohr Institute and Nordita.

Since 2013 I have been involved with lecturing at AIMS (African Institute of Mathematical Sciences) in Ghana, Senegal and South Africa. 

More information can be found at  https://www.professordes.uk

Recent research interests have included the 3D Plaquette Ising Model and Fractons as well as ``Balls in Boxes'' models for condensation transitions. I have also been interested in simulations, and even occasional calculations, with various sorts of matter on dynamical lattices, random surfaces and random graphs and have made occasional forays into solvable nonequilibrium models such as the ASEP (Asymmmetric Exclusion Process) and ZRP (Zero Range Process) and information geometry. Way, way back in PhD student days I investigated the gauge-independence of the effective potential in quantum field theories.

I survived coordinating an EC HCM network grant Analytical and Numerical Investigations of Random Geometries 1993-1996 with only marginal hair loss and was foolish enough to take on coordinating another EC IHP network grant Discrete Random Geometries: From Solid State Physics to Quantum Gravity and an associated ESF network for the period 2000-2004, but I cunningly passed the role of network co-ordinator onto Renate Loll for the Framework 6 network ENRAGE 2005-2009.

I was co-investigator on the EPSRC grant EP/R009465/1, PI R. Weston, Baxter Relations for Open Integrable Quantum Spin Chains 2018-2021.

Mindful that everyone is jumping on the quantum computing bandwagon, I helped organize an LMS Research School on Quantum Machine Learning and Hamiltonian Simulation at The Gaelic College on Skye in 2025.

Some (relatively) recent seminar slides are at https://www.professordes.uk/home-academic/talks

Some (relatively) recent videos of seminars are at https://www.professordes.uk/home-academic/videos

More information in general can be found at https://www.professordes.uk/home-academic/research