28/05/2026
Massive congratulations to Professor Dwight Barkley, who has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society - one of the highest accolades in mathematics.
Professor Barkley is one of over 90 outstanding researchers from across the world have this year been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences. Fellowship of the Royal Society has been described by The Guardian as "the equivalent of a lifetime achievement Oscar."
Dwight Barkley is an applied mathematician whose research lies in nonlinear dynamics, pattern formation, and scientific computation. His work spans fluid, chemical, and biological systems, with a particular focus on the emergence of complex spatiotemporal behaviour in nonlinear partial differential equations.
He has made influential contributions to the study of instabilities, bifurcations, symmetry breaking, and wave phenomena in nonlinear systems, often through the development of original computational approaches that yield fundamental mathematical and physical insight. He has played a leading role in shaping the modern understanding of transition to turbulence in shear flows. He is widely known for two distinct models that bear his name—the Barkley model of excitable media and the Barkley model for pipe flow.
He was awarded the SIAM J. D. Crawford Prize for his contributions to nonlinear science. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the European Mechanics Society, and the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications.
Becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society sees him join the ranks of Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Dorothy Hodgkin.
