Based at the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham, Dr Andrew Parkes was a theoretical physicist by original training. He undertook research in supersymmetry and superstrings, including a postdoc at CERN. He transferred to Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, studying and working at the University of Oregon in the area of optimisation methods. 

He joined Nottingham in 2005 to work on the management and planning of teaching space. He was on the executive committee of “The LANCS initiative” a major multi-University project in Operations Research. He is a co-founder of EURO (Association of European Operational Research societies) working group “Data Science meets Optimisation” and that aims to bring together the data science and optimisation communities.