Rate My Professor Brailey Sims

Brailey Sims is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia, within the College of Engineering, Science and Environment. He obtained his Bachelor of Science with First-Class Honours and University Medal in 1969 from the University of Newcastle, followed by a PhD in 1972 from the same institution, with a thesis titled 'On Numerical Range and its Application to Banach Algebra' supervised by Associate Professor John R. Giles. His academic career began as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the University of New England from 1972 to 1989. In 1990, he joined the University of Newcastle as Associate Professor, serving until 2012, after which he continued on a three-year post-retirement contract at 35% capacity. Sims has held distinguished visiting professorships at institutions including Chiang Mai University (2002, 2003, 2004, 2010), CIMAT in Mexico (2004), the University of Seville (2013), and several Korean universities (1999), as well as visiting scholar positions at Simon Fraser University (1996) and Kent State University (1986). Administratively, he has served as Head of Department/School and Deputy President of Academic Senate at the University of Newcastle, and as a member of various university committees.

Sims' research focuses on functional and nonlinear analysis, encompassing metric fixed point theory, attainment problems in Banach spaces and geodesic metric spaces, projection-type algorithms for feasibility problems such as Douglas-Rachford methods, and ultraproduct techniques. He has published over 60 refereed papers in leading international journals, including the seminal 'A new approach to generalized metric spaces' (2006, with Z. Mustafa), 'Fixed point theorems for contractive mappings in complete G-metric spaces' (2009, with Z. Mustafa), and 'Fixed points of uniformly Lipschitzian mappings' (2006, with S. Dhompongsa and W.A. Kirk). He co-edited the 'Handbook of Metric Fixed Point Theory' (2001, with W.A. Kirk) and contributed to books like 'The Douglas-Rachford algorithm in the absence of convexity' (2011). As chief investigator, he has secured 26 grants totaling $18,220,168, including ARC Discovery Projects on relaxed reflection methods (2016) and structured barrier functions (2012). Sims has supervised eight PhD completions, served on editorial boards for journals such as Journal of Nonlinear Analysis – Theory, Methods and Applications, Journal of Fixed Point Theory and Applications, and Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society, and delivered keynote addresses at conferences including the 7th International Conference on Fixed Point Theory and Applications (2005).