William R. B. Lionheart

William R. B. Lionheart
Born	William Robert Breckon
🏳️ Nationality	British
🎓 Alma mater	University of Warwick (B.Sc.); Oxford Brookes University (Ph.D.)
💼 Occupation
Known for	Electrical impedance tomography; inverse problems; tomographic reconstruction

William Robert Breckon Lionheart is a British applied mathematician specialising in inverse problems, tomographic imaging, and low‑frequency electromagnetic sensing. He is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester. His research spans theoretical, numerical, and practical aspects of inverse problems with applications in medicine, industry, security, and non‑destructive testing.

Early life and education

Lionheart studied mathematics at the University of Warwick, receiving a B.Sc. degree. He completed his Ph.D. at Oxford Brookes University in 1990 under the supervision of Michael Pidcock working on problems in electrical impedance tomography.

Academic career

Lionheart began his academic career at Oxford Polytechnic (later Oxford Brookes University), where he worked as a lecturer and senior lecturer. In 1999 he joined UMIST as Lecturer in Applied Mathematics, becoming Reader in 2002. Following the merger that created the modern University of Manchester, he was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics in 2005.

He has collaborated with major UK imaging centres including the Henry Moseley X‑ray Imaging Facility and the CCPi (Collaborative Computational Project in Tomographic Imaging). His work also contributes to the National X‑ray Computed Tomography (NXCT) network.

Research

Lionheart works across a wide range of imaging modalities, including:

• electrical impedance tomography (EIT)
• magnetic induction tomography (MIT)
• X‑ray computed tomography
• neutron tomography and polarimetric neutron imaging
• radar and microwave imaging
• diffuse optical tomography

His research interests include inverse boundary value problems, integral geometry, rich tomography, regularisation theory, finite element methods, numerical linear algebra, and Bayesian approaches to inverse problems.

Lionheart was a founder member of the EIDORS project for EIT reconstruction, and is a contributor to the Core Imaging Library (CIL), a major open‑source framework for tomographic reconstruction used in synchrotron and laboratory imaging.

Name

Early publications appear under the name W. R. Breckon. By the early 1990s his papers appear under the name W. R. B. Lionheart. ORCID also lists both names as author aliases.

Selected publications

• Adler, A.; Lionheart, W. R. B. (2001). "Uses and abuses of EIDORS: an extensible software base for EIT". Physiological Measurement.
• Lionheart, W. R. B. (2021). Computed Tomography: Algorithms, Insight, and Just Enough Theory. SIAM.
• Wensrich, C. M.; Holman, S.; Lionheart, W. R. B.; Courdurier, M.; Jackson, R. R. (2026). "Uniqueness of solutions in high‑energy X‑ray eigenstrain tomography". Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

Professional recognition

Lionheart is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (FIMA) and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET). He has supervised numerous doctoral students in inverse problems and imaging science.

External links

• [University of Manchester academic profile| https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/Bill.Lionheart/]
• Entry at ORCID

Categories

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