Stephen Roberts was Head of the Department of Mathematics at the Australian National University from 2006-2012.

Stephen is heavily involved in the computational science community in Australia. From 2003-2006 he was the national coordinator of the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) Education, Outreach and Training program. He is currently the treasurer of the committee of the Computational Mathematics Group, a special interest group of ANZIAM.

His research area is the application of efficient and robust numerical methods for the solution of partial differential equations.

He is the lead developer at the ANU of the ANUGA hydrodynamic modeling software. ANUGA is an open source computational tool that models the impact of dam breaks, floods and tsunamis on communities. It is used extensively by councils, governments and consultant engineers.

In the area of data fitting he has developed sparse grid methods for Multidimensional function fitting and approximation of high dimensional probability density functions. He has also developed finite element approximation methods for thin plate spline functional smoothing which can scale to millions of data points.

In 1980, Stephen completed his MSc Science at Flinders Univerisy, supervised by Prof Garth Gaudry, working on A_p spaces and asymmetry of L_p operator norms for convolution operators. In 1985, Stephen completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by Prof Alexandre Chorin, working on the Convergence of a random walk method for the Burgers equation.