Brief academic
biography
A native of Essex, Mark V Lawson was educated at Belfairs High School,
Southend Technical College, York University and Cambridge. He
received his
BA in Mathematics from York University in 1981, studied for the
Part III at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and then returned
to
York to work on his DPhil under the supervison of John Fountain. During
this time, he was also a part-time course tutor for the Open
University.
His post-doc took him first to Lincoln College, Oxford for three years
as the Thomas Rotherham Junior Research Fellow in Mathematics, and then
to the Technische Universitaet, Darmstadt to work for a year in Karl H
Hofmann's research group supported by a Royal Society European Exchange
Scheme Programme Fellowship. In 1989, he returned to Britain to take up
a lectureship in mathematics at the University of Wales, Bangor. In
1999,
he became a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at Bangor, and in 2004 he
moved to Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh to take up a lectureship. He
was promoted to senior lecturer in 2007.
Lawson's research interests centre on algebraic semigroup theory,
automata theory and
category theory. He has published over 55 papers and given over 50
research
lectures both at home and abroad.
He has made research visits to Australia (1992, 1994), Hungary (1996),
Germany (1996), Portugal (1998, 2001, 2008, 2010), Israel (2000, 2009)
and
Canada
(2000, 2010). Six research students have successfully completed
their
PhD's under his
supervision: Peter Hines (1998), Helen James (2000), Tanveer Khan
(2001), Joseph Matthews (2004) , David Gareth Jones (2011) and Bassima
Afara (2011).
His book Inverse semigroups: the
theory of partial symmetries was
published
by World Scientific in 1998 and has been well-reviewed. Another book Finite
automata was published 2003. In 2003, he carried out research
for DSTL
on automata theory.
Lawson is one of the communicating editors of Semigroup Forum, one of the algebra
editors for the Proceedings of the
Edinburgh Mathematical
Society, first year director of studies in mathematics, course
director
for the joint degree in Maths and
Computer Science, member of the University's
discipline committee, member of the EPSRC Scottish
Maths Training Centre
algebra team, and external examiner for pure mathematics at the
University of Newcastle.
In 2011, he was awarded the Graduates' Teaching Prize at Heriot-Watt
University.