Fordyce Davidson is Professor of Mathematics and holds the Bell Burnell Chair.

Fordyce  obtained a PhD in Mathematics from Heriot-Watt University in 1993. He took up a permanent position at the University of Dundee in 1997 and became Professor of Mathematics in 2015.

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, is an Editor of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh A and is on the Editorial Boards of the IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics and Fungal Ecology. He was a Berkeley Award winner and past Vice President of the British Mycological Society.

Fordyce was Interim Dean of the School of Science and Engineering for Academic Year 15-16 and then, as part of a secondment to External Relations within the University, led the development and launch of International College Dundee. In 2018 he took on the addition role of Academic Regional Lead for East Asia before returning full-time to the School of Science and Engineering in 2020 where as Deputy Dean he held portfolio responsibility of student recruitment and conversion until May 2023. Fordyce served as Interim and then substantive Dean of Science and Engineering from 2023 to 2025.

His research interests spread across two complementary areas:

• The quantitative study of biological systems
• The analysis of differential equations models arising from biology

Most of his recent work has been aimed at developing a better understand of the collective behaviour of microbes, in particular the form and function of bacterial biofilms. In parallel he continues to work on understanding the solution structure of ordinary, partial and functional differential equations; in particular, reaction-diffusion-convection systems, arising from a variety of biological applications.