School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham

Dr. Richard Mycroft

Senior Lecturer in Mathematics

Email: r.mycroft   @   bham.ac.uk

Office: Room 322, Watson Building (R15 on the Campus map)

Combinatorics, Probability and Algorithms at Birmingham

My Publications and Preprints

My Research

My research interests lie in the field of combinatorics, and more specifically in the area of extremal graph theory. In particular I have worked extensively on embedding problems relating to hypergraphs and directed graphs. From 2018 to 2022 my programme of research is being supported by a £295k EPSRC Standard Grant for a project titled `Properties of Extremal and Random Hypergraphs'; previously my research was supported from 2015 to 2017 by a £124k EPSRC First Grant for a project titled `Embeddings in Hypergraphs'.

I began my research career with PhD study at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Deryk Osthus and co-supervised by Daniela Kühn; my doctoral thesis, submitted in 2010, was titled "The regularity method for directed graphs and hypergraphs". I then held a position for one year as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant with Peter Keevash at Queen Mary, University of London, before returning to the University of Birmingham to take up a lectureship in June 2011. In 2017 I was promoted to Senior Lecturer.

I am currently supervisor for Amarja Kathapurkar, a third-year PhD student at the University of Birmingham. Prior to this I supervised two PhD students from 2014 to 2018: Frederik Garbe (now postdoctoral researcher at Masaryk University, Brno) and Tássio Naia (now postdoctoral researcher at the University of São Paulo). I have also worked with two postdoctoral researchers funded by my EPSRC grants: Dr Maryam Sharifzadeh (now assistant professor at Umeå University) in 2020, and Dr Andrew McDowell in 2016-17. I am always keen to hear from talented students who are interested in PhD research; please do get in touch if you would like further information.

Together with Daniela Kühn and Deryk Osthus I organised a workshop on Probabilistic methods in Graph Theory, which was held in March 2012. In Spring 2015 I organised the Birmingham Combinatorics Seminar, and in Spring 2017 I organised a reading group on hypergraph Turán theory. From 2012 to 2018 I also jointly organised the Birmingham mathematics colloquium. Together with Allan Lo, Guillem Perarnau and Andrew Treglown I organised the 2019 British Combinatorial Conference held at the University of Birmingham.

My Teaching

Since moving to Birmingham in June 2011, I have lectured the following courses: Students taking these courses should see the relevant course pages on Canvas for lecture notes, problem sheets and other supporting materials.

Last updated: February 2021