Dr Wilkinson was born in Paisley, Scotland. He has held academic appointments in England, France, Germany, Italy, the USA, as well as in his home country of Scotland. Since having left, he misses the beauty of the Scottish Highlands, but is starting to feel at home in the Appalachians! He has been teaching at Berea College since August 2025. He worked with Professor Sir John Ball and Dr Arghir Zarnescu at the University of Oxford for his dissertation on rigorous condensed matter physics. In recent years, he research interests have been in billiard systems and their applications to hard sphere dynamics and the Boltzmann equation, as well as in mathematical machine learning.

Dr Wilkinson runs the Math Modeling Club (M^2C) at Berea, where undergraduate students are invited to join and work collaboratively on real research projects that span months, and even years!

In his personal life, Dr Wilkinson loves spending time with his wife and two boys. He also enjoys spending time with his huge extended family that also lives in Berea! In his free time, he likes learning about and building computers.