Neil heads up the Condensed Matter Theory Group in the Clarendon Laboratory. He did his BA at Cambridge University (St John's College) and PhD at Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar. He was then made a Research Fellow at St. John's College, Cambridge University, and a Professor in Physics at the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogota). He came to Oxford in 1992. See http:www.lincoln.ox.ac.uk/fellows/johnson/

Neil presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures ‘Arrows of Time’ on BBC TV in 1999. His group's research focuses on complex systems, both in the classical and quantum regimes, and in application domains as far apart as biology, medicine, finance, and sociology. See ‘Financial Market Complexity’ (Oxford University Press, 2003)

http:www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-852665-2

Also see his new popular science book on Complexity, 'Two's Company, Three is Complexity' (Oneworld Publishing, 2007) which gives an overview of this inter-disciplinary work.

He is the Series Editor for Complex Systems and Inter-disciplinary Science by World Scientific Press. He has also been an Editor of International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance. Neil is a director of Oxford University's computational centre for the study of financial markets as complex systems.