Professor of Mathematical Physics
Heriot-Watt University
Des Johnston grew up in Belfast and
studied physics as an undergraduate at Trinity College,
Cambridge before getting a PhD in Theoretical physics
from Imperial College, London in 1986. He then spent
three and a half years as a postdoc in LPTHE (now LPT)
Orsay, France (1986-7), Caltech (1987-9) and the Free
University of Berlin (1989-90)- just in time to see the
wall come down. Deciding it was a good idea to get a
proper job, but reluctant to get a haircut and put on a
suit, he came back to Britain to work as a temporary
lecturer at Lancaster University in the school of
physics, before arriving at Heriot-Watt in 1990, where
he has languished ever since apart from a year away in
1993-4 at Orsay again. His research interests are in
statistical mechanics and disordered systems, with
dabblings in simulating discretized models of gravity.