Grindrod was appointed a CBE in 2005 for services to mathematics R&D. He is a former member of the EPSRC Council and chair of the EPSRC's User Panel. He is a former president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the UK's professional and learned society for mathematicians. He is also former member of BBSRC Council. He is a former independent member of the MOD DSAC. He was one of the founding directors of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national centre for Data Science and AI. He began working in the theory and application of reaction diffusion equations. He obtained a degree in maths from the University of Bristol and a PhD from the University of Dundee, after which followed a short period of post doctoral research in dynamical systems and nonlinear PDEs at Dundee. Between 1984 and 1989 he worked at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, largely on both applications and modelling within physiology and biology. In 1989 he joined a commercial consulting company working in the environmental sciences, building up a mathematical modelling group on multidisciplinary projects in the UK, Europe, US and Japan. His research ranged from the application of fractals to simulating subsurface environments, and non-linear multiphase dispersion processes, fully coupled chemical-temperature–hydration systems, through to the development of frameworks for estimating uncertainties within risk assessments, and the analysis of public risk perception. He has developed models and methods for analyzing large networks occurring within the biosciences, such as in genome, proteome and metabolome interactions. He is interested in applications of mathematics to phenomena in the Digital Economy, and within neurodynamics. He is working on methods for analysing very large and evolving graphs/networks, including forecasting, inference and intervention problems. These have applications to large communication networks - especially in monitoring marketing and intervention applications. In 1998 he was co-founder and Technical Director of a start–up company, Numbercraft Limited, supplying services and software to retailers and consumer goods manufacturers. The need to extract structure and information, rapidly, and exhaustively, from large commercial data sets drove this. He worked with all of the major grocery retailers in the UK and their largest suppliers. Numbercraft, designed as a five-year project, was acquired by Lawson Software in 2003. Around 2010, he was a co-founder of Cignifi Inc, based in Boston MA, developing behaviour based credit scoring methods for mobile Network Operators' customers, depending on their individual call data records over a just a few weeks. Cignifi operates within a number of counties, in partnerships with MNOs wishing to extend mobile bang to include loans, insurance es and other financial products. Grindrod is also active in advising digital marketing companies, on their use of social network analytics. In 2018 he became an advisor to OOway, a new Chinese fintec player building online platform to evaluate credit risk for a massive number of Chinese SMEs, all seeking to take loans so as to enable trading via the "One Belt One Road" initiative. He advises on technologies and methods that can use transactional data rather than traditional credit scoring methods. He is also a champion of agent based simulation as a means of modelling and forecasting global marine trade and transport at a fundamentatl level. Maritime players are in increasingly dependent on such data science and he chairs a start-up, GTT Analytics Ltd, within this sector. Grindrod is a Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford. He was born in Oxford in 1959, and has a twin brother, Simon. He married Dora in 1985, and they have four children, Tom, Chris, Jumbly and Sophie. He lives in Henley on Thames. His Who's Who entry says he supports Manchester United, and plays the guitar. He also has two dogs, a Rhodesian ridgeback called Bella and a Golden Retriever called Millie.
