Our People

Professor Michael Bonsall

A headshot

Professor Michael Bonsall

  • Fellow and Tutor in Biological Sciences
  • Professor of Mathematical Biology

I am Fellow and Tutor in Biological Sciences and Professor of Mathematical Biology in the Department of Zoology. I joined St Peters in 2005 and previous to this completed my undergraduate degree, PhD and held a Royal Society research fellowship within the Department of Biological Sciences at Imperial College London.

Teaching

In college I teach ecology, evolution and quantitative methods. We share this teaching with tutors and lecturers from other colleges to ensure the breadth of the MBiol course is complimented with appropriate tutorials. In the Department I currently give lectures on the second year ecology and animal behaviour courses. I teach part of the second year statistics module and have recently taught a third-year module on theoretical epidemiology and public health.

Research

My research focuses on applications of mathematics to problems in the life sciences (and beyond). In detail, I am interested in population biology (population dynamics, community ecology, evolutionary ecology). Research in the group focuses on a wide range of questions such as the population and evolutionary dynamics of life history strategies (e.g. the evolution of longevity), the role of spatial structure on shared enemy and competing enemy interactions, the effects of enrichment on the diversity of ecological communities, the interplay between noise and dynamics in multispecies interactions and the evolution of resistance to microbes.

Many of these projects involve the development of theoretical models in conjunction with experiments or observations in the field or laboratory. To this end, we aim to test different ecological and evolutionary ecology theories by fitting relevant mathematical models to appropriate ecological experimental (or observational) data. Further details of my research interests can be found here.