Philip Maini is the son of Panna Lal Maini and Satya Wati Bhandari. Panna Lal and Satya Wati were from Punjab in North West India. Panna Lal traveled to Northern Ireland in 1954. He had sailed to London on the ship Maloja of the Peninsula and Orient Steam Navigation Company arriving there on 18 February 1954. Satya Wati and Philip's elder brother Arvind did not arrive in Northern Ireland until 1957.[11]
After a postdoctoral research position at Oxford and an associate professorship at the University of Utah, he returned to Oxford in 1990 as university lecturer in mathematical biology with a tutorial fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford.[11] He became director of the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology in 1998, then Statutory Professor in Mathematical Biology and professorial fellow of St John's College, Oxford in 2005.[1][13]
From 2002 to 2015 Maini was the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology and has served on the editorial boards of many other journals.[13] Maini gave an invited talk at ICM 2010 in Hyderabad, speaking on "Modelling Aspects of Tumour Metabolism."[18]
Philip Maini's mathematical and computational modelling of spatiotemporal processes in biology and medicine has led to significant scientific advances in both. His work on biological pattern formation has led to detailed understanding of the roles of noise, domain growth and gradients in pattern generation. He has generalised the concept of gradient information and has proposed an experimentally consistent resolution of the chemotactic wave paradox. He has developed multiscale models for wound healing and for vascular tumour growth. He has thereby elucidated the underlying mechanisms by which particular growth factors reduce scar formation and has provided detailed insight into the design of combination cancer therapy.[19]
In 2024 he was awarded the Sylvester Medal by the Royal Society "for his contributions to mathematical biology, especially the interdisciplinary modelling of biomedical phenomena and systems".[24]
