Simon Preston

Simon Preston is a Lecturer at the School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham. He obtained his MMath and PhD in Mathematics from Nottingham, supervised by Sarah Waters and Oliver Jensen.

His research focuses on statistical inference for manifold-valued data, including shape analysis, spherical distributions, and stochastic differential equations. He has contributed to methods like ESAG distribution for anisotropic spherical data and shapePCA for analyzing shape variation via principal components.

Recent publications address network analysis on manifolds, non-parametric regression, and Bayesian model selection in biological and urban contexts. His work spans applications in immunology (T-cell motility), plant architecture, and computational linguistics.

Scientific Awards:

• RCUK Academic Fellowship
• EPSRC Statistics Mobility Fellowship

He has collaborated extensively with Andy Wood, Sarah Waters, and Oliver Jensen, and his technical work includes MATLAB toolboxes for shape analysis and stochastic differential equation inference.