We were delighted to catch up recently with Old Boy, Chris Dent, Professor of Industrial Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, to hear how he became a Fellow of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences.

Please describe your journey since leaving BGS and how you progressed to your most recent/current position.

I spent all 14 years of my Schooldays at BGS, having joined the Kindergarten in 1980 aged 4 – so those 14 years can be summarised quickly, but the next 14 is a longer tale. After studying Maths, further Maths and Physics A-levels (so I really have not done much apart from maths for a long time!) I read Mathematics at Peterhouse, Cambridge, then did my PhD on the theory of high temperature superconductors at Loughborough, and four years of postdoctoral research in semiconductor physics at Heriot-Watt and Marburg Universities. I then decided to leave academia, and studied for the MSc in Operational Research (which roughly means business mathematics) at the University of Edinburgh… and instead of leaving academia, in 2007 I joined the Institute for Energy Systems at the University of Edinburgh as a researcher in energy system reliability. In 2009 I moved to the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences at Loughborough, becoming a Lecturer in 2011. Since 2016 I have worked in the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, and was promoted to Professor in 2020. I qualified as a Chartered Engineer in 2017, and in 2025 I was appointed as one of the first cohort of Fellows of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences.

My job title of “industrial mathematics” simply means (in the University of Edinburgh’s School of Mathematics) that the job advert said candidates must have had an effect on the world outside academia, which in my case back then was work with National Grid on the risk of electricity supply shortfalls, commonly (and inaccurately) known as ‘the risks of the lights going out’.  Since I joined the School 10 years ago, this has expanded to a much wider range of work with the infrastructure industry and with government.

What does your role involve, what is an average day like for you?

My work is very varied. As an academic my role consists of a mixture of research, teaching and management, and I also do consultancy on topics in my areas of specialism. I teach a course on modelling topics relevant to the energy industry, and supervise undergraduate and student projects. In research and consulting, recent work has varied from my long-standing interests in energy supply reliability to projects on climate resilience, and quantum computing threats to cyber security. Thus a day could consist of anything from teaching a class and meeting internal colleagues, to meeting companies about new projects.

What is your proudest professional achievement?

This must be my appointment to the first cohort of Fellows of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences, in recognition of my own work, and part in the development of a community of mathematical scientists engaged with present challenges in energy supply. There are things someone can reasonably hope for at the outset of their career, and becoming a Fellow of a national Academy is not one of these – I have been very fortunate to have the opportunities that led to this happening last year.

What is the most challenging period of your career?

This was undoubtedly working out what I was going to do when I decided in my late 20s to change direction away from the seven years I had spent in Physics (which was my whole working life up to then). Unusually, I decided to study for a Masters degree four years after my PhD, to give myself a wider range of options – while my plan had been to work in the private sector, this year studying opened up a range of opportunities in other areas of research which led me to where I am now.

What have you enjoyed most about your role?

Undoubtedly the wide range of topics I work on, and people I have the opportunity to work with, combined with the opportunity to do interesting mathematical work for the benefit of society. The latter is perhaps illustrated by the experience I had on 5 October 2012 of getting home, putting the BBC news on, and finding that a project I had been part of (the first Great Britain study on risks of electricity supply shortfalls) was the lead item on the BBC 6 o’clock news – this was the point at which I realised I was no longer in the normal business of academic research!

How did Bury Grammar School help you to be successful in your chosen career?

I still benefit from the very good grounding in the basic techniques of mathematics, both the uniformly strong teaching, and the amount of time I had studying Additional Maths in the 5th year and Further Maths in the sixth form simply to practice – this idea of practice is something more often associated with other walks of life such as music than with mathematics, but if at some point one does not have a lot of time to work on the basic techniques it is difficult to pick this up later on.

When you look back at your time at BGS, what are some of your fondest memories?

Of everything I was involved in, I’d pick out the joint productions of musicals. I started playing the cello relatively late, so only took part in these in the sixth form – I played in one of the Gilbert and Sullivans (sadly I cannot remember which!) and in The Sound of Music. The quality of these was always very special, and others I particularly remember seeing as an audience member were Fiddler on the Roof, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.