Introduction

Hello, I am Toby Benjamin Clark, a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham, based in the Computational Optimisation and Learning Lab.

My research sits at the intersection of combinatorial optimisation and formal methods. Currently, I am interested in the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories for the synthesis and verification of provably-correct pruning rules in machine sequencing problems.

I am fully-funded by the University of Nottingham under a studentship award, supervised by Dr Jason Atkin and Dr Geert De Maere. Prior to starting my PhD, I worked with a variety of logic-adjacent domains, including dependent type theory, formal linguistics, and program verification.

I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Nottingham, where I graduated top of my cohort in Computer Science. My bachelor’s thesis was supervised by Dr Ulrik Buchholtz and my master’s thesis by Professor Thorsten Altenkirch. Before starting university, I attended The Billericay School near my hometown of Basildon, Essex.

Outside of academia, I have experience as both an industry consultant and software engineer, focusing on the application of mathematical programming into real-world systems, including energy optimisation, electric vehicle routing, and biodiversity credit trading.

In my spare time, I regularly compete in competitions, hackathons and pursue independent projects, some of which are collected in Oddments. These give me opportunities to explore topical areas of computer science; several of these projects have won awards, and one was featured on BBC World.

If you would like to get in touch with me, please feel free to email me at toby.clark@nottingham.ac.uk.