Neil Michael O'Connell is an Irish mathematician from Shannon, County Clare. He attended Trinity College Dublin, and was elected to scholarship in 1987.[1] He earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics and a gold medal in 1989 and completed an M.Sc. in 1990. He obtained his PhD in 1993 at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Steven Neil Evans.[2] [3] He subsequently worked at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies,[4] and the University of Warwick.
He works in probability theory, in particular random matrices. He was awarded the inaugural Itô prize in 2002 (together with Ben Hambly and James Martin),[5] and the Rollo Davidson Prize in 2005.[6] In 2013 he was Doob Lecturer at the 36th Conference on Stochastic Processes and Their Applications, in Boulder, Colorado.[7] He is currently Professor at University College Dublin.