Alison Etheridge facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Dame Alison Etheridge
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Alison Etheridge at the Royal Society admissions day in 2015
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| Born |
Alison Mary Etheridge
27 April 1964 |
| Citizenship | British |
| Education | Smestow Comprehensive School |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford (MA, DPhil) |
| Spouse(s) |
Lionel Mason
(m. 1997) |
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| Scientific career | |
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| Thesis | Asymptotic Behaviour of Some Measure-Valued Diffusions (1989) |
| Doctoral advisor | David Albert Edwards |
Dame Alison Mary Etheridge (born in 1964) is a top professor of Probability at the University of Oxford. She used to be the head of the Statistics Department there. She is also a special member, called a fellow, at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Education
Alison Etheridge went to Smestow School when she was younger. She then studied mathematics at New College, Oxford. She earned her first degree in 1985. After that, she spent a year doing master's research.
From 1986 to 1987, she traveled to McGill University in Canada. She had help from the Canadian Rhodes Scholars Foundation. She then came back to Oxford. There, she became a Junior Fellow and a tutor for women at New College. In 1989, she finished her advanced degree, called a DPhil. Her research was guided by David Albert Edwards.
Career and Research
After finishing her DPhil, Alison Etheridge worked at different universities. She had research jobs in Oxford and Cambridge. She also worked at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Edinburgh, and Queen Mary University of London. In 1997, she returned to Oxford.
Throughout her career, she has studied many different things. These range from tricky math puzzles to real-world problems. She has written four books about her work. One book is about special math ideas called superprocesses. Another book, written with Mark H. A. Davis, explores how ideas from a math paper in 1900 helped create today's math used in money and banking.
Much of her recent work is about using math to understand population genetics. This is the study of how genes change in groups of living things. She has especially worked on how where living things live affects their genes.
Professor Etheridge has made big contributions to the study of probability. She also links probability to real-world uses. Her main research areas include special math ideas like superprocesses. She also studies the math behind how genes change in groups of living things. Another area is mathematical ecology, which uses math to study how living things interact with their environment.
Recently, she has focused on the genes of groups of living things spread out over an area. She has used advanced math about random changes to do this. She even solved a tricky math problem called the 'pain in the torus'. Her work often uses ideas from many different areas, like math about images. This has led to a new way to use math to understand how living things and their genes work together. It also created new and interesting math tools. The wide range of her work is also shown in her four books. They cover topics from the history of financial mathematics to using math to model how genes change in populations.
She was the leader of the Statistics Department at the University of Oxford. This job lasted for three years until August 2022. She also helped decide how well math research is doing in the UK.
Awards and Honours
Alison Etheridge became a special member, called a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), in 2015. This is a very high honor for scientists. In 2016, she also became a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. They said she was chosen for her "amazing research" and for being a "great leader" in her field.
In 2017, she was chosen to be the president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics for one year. The London Mathematical Society gave her the Senior Anne Bennett Prize in 2017. She was also given the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2017 for her work in science. The University of Edinburgh gave her an honorary science degree in 2018/19. She has also been part of important groups that advise on science and math research in the UK.
She is a Trustee of the Royal Society and a member of its main council. In September 2021, she became the head of the Council for the Mathematical Sciences. In 2023, she was chosen to be a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Also in 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.
Images for kids
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Alison Etheridge at the Royal Society admissions day in 2015
