John R. Terry

John R. Terry is a British mathematician, currently an Interdisciplinary Professorial Fellow and EPSRC Established Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham, where he is Director of the Centre for Systems Modelling and Quantitative Biomedicine. He was previously Director of the EPSRC Centre for Predictive Modelling in Healthcare, a £2M initiative funded by the EPSRC. He is well known for the development and application of mathematical techniques in biology and medicine, notably epilepsy and neuroendocrinology. He is a member of the ILAE task force on Network Diseases, as well as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of Epilepsy Research UK. According to Gateway to Research he has received approaching £13M in research funding, a substantial amount for a mathematician. His research has been recognized internationally, most recently by the University of Melbourne through a Miegunyah Fellowship.

Career
Terry was an undergraduate at the University of Reading before taking a PhD at the University of Surrey. He has held academic positions at Loughborough University, the University of Bristol, the University of Sheffield and the University of Exeter, before joining the University of Birmingham in 2019. During his time at the University of Exeter he established the Centre for Biomedical Modelling and Analysis, of which he was co-director, supported by the Wellcome Trust.

In 2018 Terry with Dr Wessel Woldman co-founded Neuronostics, a company focussed on epilepsy diagnosis and management. In 2020 Neuronostics was named national start-up of the year by Medilink UK. In 2021 Neuronostics was one of the final four in the Nature SpinOff Prize. In 2022 Neuronostics was named a winner in the Science StartUp category of the Falling Walls Foundation.

Scientific contributions
As a graduate student, Terry focused on synchronization problems in solid state laser systems, before moving into neuroscience during his postdoctoral career. He is most well known for his work in describing the mechanisms of seizures and susceptibility to epilepsy, utilising mathematical models for the first time in the context of diagnosis and surgery. He is also highly cited in the field of neuroendocrinology, where along with Stafford Lightman he has described the pituitary-adrenal interplay responsible for hourly rhythms in the stress responsive hormone cortisol.