Rate My Professor James McCoy

Professor James McCoy is an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer and Information Sciences (Mathematics) at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He earned his PhD in mathematics from Monash University in 2002, supervised by Klaus Ecker, with a thesis titled "The surface area preserving mean curvature flow," and a Bachelor of Science (Honours) from the same university. His career trajectory includes an ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship and progression to Lecturer-Associate Professor at the University of Wollongong from 2005 to 2018, followed by Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the University of Newcastle from 2018 to 2021 and subsequent Professor role. He served as Head of the Mathematics Discipline at Newcastle from January 2018 to early 2020, contributed to the Vice Chancellor's Academic Excellence team, and held roles on the CESE College Board, Academic Senate, as ERA Champion for applied mathematics, and on the Athena SWAN silver application team. McCoy represented the University of Newcastle as Joint Venture Partner to the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) since 2018, serving as AMSI Deputy Director in 2023 and 2024. He was Visiting Professor and Excellence Chair in Pure Mathematics at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology from December 2019 to March 2020.

A geometric analyst, McCoy's research focuses on curvature driven heat-type flows of hypersurfaces, long-time existence and singularity formation in globally constrained curvature flows, and solution extensions beyond singularities via surgery procedures. His work draws on differential geometry, partial differential equations—including second and higher even order elliptic and parabolic equations—and topology, addressing both nonlinear and linear settings. Notable publications include "Contracting convex hypersurfaces by curvature" (2013, with B. Andrews and Y. Zheng), "Mixed volume preserving curvature flows" (2003), "A rigidity theorem for ideal surfaces with flat boundary" (2020, with G. Wheeler), "Semi-discrete linear curvature flows of curves with boundary" (2026, with R. St Hill), and "Representation formulae for second order linear hyperbolic curvature flows of convex hypersurfaces" (2026). With over 45 journal articles, he has supervised five PhD completions, led grants totaling $1,975,550—including ARC Discovery Projects—refereed for over 30 international journals, reviewed over 140 articles for Math Reviews, and serves as Associate Editor (Deputy Editor since 2024) for the Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society and guest editor for Mathematics in Engineering. He delivered invited talks at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in 2023.