Neil Strickland was awarded his PhD by the University of Manchester in 1992. He was then a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then a Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, before moving to Sheffield in 1998. He was awarded the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2005.

Prof Strickland works in stable homotopy theory, a branch of topology in which one studies phenomena that occur uniformly in all sufficiently high dimensions. On the one hand, the subject involves many direct geometrical constructions with interesting spaces such as complex algebraic varieties, coset spaces of Lie groups, spaces of subsets of Euclidean space, and so on. On the other hand, one can use generalised cohomology theories to translate problems in stable homotopy theory into questions in pure algebra, in a strikingly rich and beautiful way. The algebra involved centres around the theory of formal groups, which is essentially a branch of algebraic geometry, although not one of the most familiar branches. It has connections with commutative algebra, Galois theory, the study of elliptic curves, finite and profinite groups, modular representation theory, and many other areas. To translate efficiently between algebra and topology we need to make heavy use of category theory, and this also has applications both on the purely algebraic and the purely topological side, so it forms another significant part of Prof Strickland's research. Students considering research with Prof Strickland are encouraged to consult his personal home page.