Derek Kitson

Dr. Derek Kitson is an Assistant Professor in Mathematics at Mary Immaculate College (MIC), Limerick, Ireland. He holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. His research focuses on geometric and combinatorial rigidity theory, with applications to frameworks, graphs, and crystallographic structures. He has supervised doctoral student Dr. Sean Dewar, who completed his thesis on rigidity in normed spaces.

Dr. Kitson’s work spans topics including graph rigidity, infinite frameworks, and operator-theoretic approaches to rigidity. He has contributed to projects funded by the EPSRC, such as the 'Geometry of auxetic materials' and 'Infinite bond-node frameworks.' His research has been presented at international conferences, including the SIAM Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry and the Fields Institute Workshop on Rigidity Theory.

He is affiliated with MIC’s research institutes and actively contributes to academic governance and postgraduate supervision. His research outputs include over 20 peer-reviewed articles in journals like Discrete and Computational Geometry and Journal of Combinatorial Theory.