Prof. Balinsky earned his PhD in Mathematical Physics from the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics in 1990. From 1993 to 1997, he was a Research Fellow at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology's Department of Mathematics. Since 1997, he has been a Professor at Cardiff University's School of Mathematics and WIMCS (Wales Institute of Mathematical and Computational Sciences), holding the Chair in Mathematical Physics.
His research focuses on spectral theory, stability of matter, image processing, and machine learning. He participated in the EU TMR network on Partial Differential Equations and Quantum Mechanics (1996–2001), served as Principal Investigator for grants from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (1996–1999) and EPSRC (2003–2006).
Prof. Balinsky was a founding member of the Cardiff Communication Research Centre and collaborated on several projects with Hewlett-Packard. He also consulted for Reuters London on mathematical models for Internet security.
His Impact Case Study, “Meeting the Challenges of Data Security: Detecting Unusual Behaviour and Mining Unstructured Data,” was one of eight highlighted among nearly 7,000 case studies submitted to REF2014, featured in Times Higher Education. Springer later invited him to contribute an article for the book REF 2014 Impact Cases: UK Success Stories in Industrial Mathematics (2015).
Currently, he leads a joint project with Hewlett-Packard and Dyfed Powys Police on “Crime Analysis and Predictive Policing.”