Professor Sir Alan Wilson FRS FBA FAcSS is Director of Special Projects at The Alan Turing Institute (Chief Executive, 2016-2018), Honorary Professor of the University College London. Until recently, Alan was Executive Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute and Chair of the Home Office Science Advisory Council.
In his research, as a mathematician and geographer, Alan works on the science of cities, building computer models that have applications in both planning and commercial sectors. He was Professor of Urban and Regional Systems in CASA, UCL from 2007 – 2018.
Alan has written many books on the applications of urban and regional modelling to planning related problems. Amongst his more recent works are his edited volumes Approaches to Geo-Mathematical Modelling: New Tools for Complexity Science (Wiley, 2016) and Global Dynamics: Approaches from Complexity Science (Wiley, 2016), and Collaborative Approach to Trade (Springer, 2017)
Alan was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds from 1991 to 2004 when he became Director-General for Higher Education in the then DfES. From 2007-2013 he was Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and from 2013-2015, of the Government Office for Science Foresight Project on The Future of Cities.
Alan is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and of the Royal Society (FRS). He was knighted in 2001 for services to higher education.