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About me
Because there is work to do, to steady
a world jarred off balance,
must a man meet only a fellow-worker
and never a man?
— Norman MacCaig, Balances (1968).
Where to start? I'm a university maths teacher with a background in applied maths, though I've been known to call myself a fluid dynamicist, a mathematical geophysicist or a theoretical sedimentologist (by which time my audience has generally gone away). I'm a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Strathclyde, which I joined in January 2006. Thanks to the teacher training I completed when I joined Strathclyde, I'm also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. (This doesn't have much bearing on my ability to teach, but some people who control my salary think it does, so please don't blame me for anything silly the HEA might say or do.) The photo above shows me at the Mammoth Museum of the Sakha Republic Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk, in July 2005; I'm the one on the right.
My main research interests are in environmental and geological fluid dynamics, specifically sediment transport, non-Newtonian fluids, and processes in porous media. My Erdős number, when I last calculated it through MathSciNet, was 4 (via Brian R. Duffy, H. Keith Moffatt, and George G. Lorentz). If you're interested in what I work on, there should be some information about my publications and my other activities kicking around on this site.
Prior to that... I was born and grew up in Edinburgh, studying at Balerno Community High School before heading south to spend three years doing a maths degree at King's College, Cambridge. I spent about a decade trying not to go native south of the border while successively completing a PhD and a postdoc position with Andrew Hogg in the School of Mathematics of the University of Bristol, and then two postdocs at the BP Institute for Multiphase Flow in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, where I was funded by NERC and where I stole most of my good ideas from Professor Andy Woods. Thanks, guys.
I think that's about it. More information can be found scattered across this site; if what you find here doesn't put you off then you can contact me by e-mail (david (dot) pritchard (at) strath.ac.uk) or write to me at the Department. That's unless you're trying to sell me something, in which case you can stop right now, please.