Derek Holt has been at the University of Warwick since 1978, where he was made a professor in 2001. He has been active in group theory research for over 40 years and has over 100 publications to his name. He was awarded the LMS Junior Whitehead Prize in 1981 for his solution to the long-standing problem of classifying groups with more than one end. He has co-authored several books including the influential graduate text Handbook of Computational Group Theory (2005). He is Editor-in-Chief of the London Mathematical Society Journal of Computation and Mathematics, and is on the editorial board of several other journals.