Alison Etheridge

Summary

Alison Mary Etheridge OBE FRS FIMA[2] (born 1964)[5] is Professor of Probability and former Head of the Department of Statistics,[6] University of Oxford.[7][8][9][10][11] Etheridge is a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.[12]

Alison Etheridge

Alison Etheridge at the Royal Society admissions day in 2015
Born
Alison Mary Etheridge

(1964-04-27) 27 April 1964 (age 59)[5]
CitizenshipBritish
EducationSmestow Comprehensive School[5]
Alma materUniversity of Oxford (MA, DPhil)[4]
Spouse
Lionel Mason
(m. 1997)
[5]
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisAsymptotic Behaviour of Some Measure-Valued Diffusions (1989)
Doctoral advisorDavid Albert Edwards[3][4]
Website
  • www.stats.ox.ac.uk/all-people/alison-etheridge/
  • www.maths.ox.ac.uk/people/alison.etheridge

Education edit

Etheridge was educated at Smestow School.[5] She read mathematics in New College, Oxford, earning a bachelor's degree in 1985 and staying on for a year of master's research. After a traveling to McGill University from 1986 to 1987, with the support of the Canadian Rhodes Scholars Foundation, she returned to Oxford as Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellow and Tutor for Women in New College.[12] She completed a doctorate (DPhil) in 1989[4] for research supervised by David Albert Edwards.[3][13]

Career and research edit

Following her PhD, Etheridge held research fellowships in Oxford and Cambridge and positions at the University of California, Berkeley, The University of Edinburgh, and Queen Mary University of London before returning to Oxford in 1997.[2]

Over the course of her career, her interests have ranged from abstract mathematical problems to concrete applications as reflected in her four books which range from a research monograph on mathematical objects called superprocesses to an exploration (co-authored with Mark H. A. Davis) of the percolation of ideas from the groundbreaking thesis of Louis Bachelier in 1900 to modern mathematical finance.[2]

Much of her recent research is concerned with mathematical models of population genetics, where she has been particularly involved in efforts to understand the effects of spatial structure of populations on their patterns of genetic variation.[2]

Etheridge has made significant contributions in the theory and applications of probability and in the links between them.[2] Her particular areas of research have been in measure-valued processes (especially superprocesses and their generalisations); in theoretical population genetics; and in mathematical ecology.[2] A recent focus has been on the genetics of spatially extended populations, where she has exploited and developed inextricable links with infinite-dimensional stochastic analysis.[2] Her resolution of the so-called 'pain in the torus' is typical of her work in that it draws on ideas from diverse areas, from measure-valued processes to image analysis.[2] The result is a flexible framework for modelling biological populations which, for the first time, combines ecology and genetics in a tractable way, while introducing a novel and mathematically interesting class of stochastic processes.[2] The breadth of her contributions is further illustrated by the topics of her four books, which range from the history of financial mathematics to mathematical modelling in population genetics.[2][14]

She is head of the University of Oxford's Department of Statistics, in a three-year post that runs until August 2022.[15] She chairs the Mathematical Sciences sub-panel of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework.[16]

Awards and honours edit

Etheridge was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015.[2] and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2016. Her citation reads:

for outstanding research on measure-valued stochastic processes and applications to population biology; and for international leadership and impressive service to the profession.[17]

In 2017, she was elected as president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics for a one-year term.[18] She was awarded the Senior Anne Bennett Prize by the London Mathematical Society in 2017,[19] and was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to science.[20] The University of Edinburgh awarded her an honorary Doctor of Science degree in 2018/19.[21] She has served on the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)'s Strategic Advisory Network and its Mathematical Sciences Strategic Advisory Team. She was appointed to the Council of the EPSRC in 2018.[22]

She is a Trustee of the Royal Society and a member of its governing council.[23] In September 2021 she became the chair of the Council for the Mathematical Sciences.[24] She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.[25]

In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.[26]

References edit

  1. ^ "List of LMS prize winners - London Mathematical Society". www.lms.ac.uk.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Anon (2015). "Professor Alison Etheridge FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 17 November 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:

    "All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 9 March 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)

  3. ^ a b Alison Etheridge at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^ a b c Etheridge, Alison Mary (1989). Asymptotic Behaviour of Some Measure-Valued Diffusions. bodleian.ox.ac.uk (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 556534862. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.329943.
  5. ^ a b c d e f Anon (2016). "Etheridge, Prof. Alison Mary (Mrs Lionel Mason)". Who's Who (online Oxford University Press ed.). Oxford: A & C Black. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U284138. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  6. ^ "Alison Etheridge, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford". Department of Statistics. Archived from the original on 16 July 2018.
  7. ^ Alison Etheridge publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  8. ^ Barton, N. H.; Etheridge, A.M. (2004). "The Effect of Selection on Genealogies". Genetics. 166 (2): 1115–1131. doi:10.1534/genetics.166.2.1115. ISSN 0016-6731. PMC 1470728. PMID 15020491.
  9. ^ Barton, N. H.; Depaulis, F; Etheridge, A. M. (2002). "Neutral evolution in spatially continuous populations". Theoretical Population Biology. 61 (1): 31–48. doi:10.1006/tpbi.2001.1557. PMID 11895381.
  10. ^ Etheridge, A. M.; Labbé, C. (2014). "Scaling limits of weakly asymmetric interfaces". Communications in Mathematical Physics. 336 (1): 287–336. arXiv:1403.2342. Bibcode:2015CMaPh.336..287E. doi:10.1007/s00220-014-2243-2. S2CID 119257791.
  11. ^ Kelleher, J; Barton, N. H.; Etheridge, A. M. (2013). "Coalescent simulation in continuous space". Bioinformatics. 29 (7): 955–6. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btt067. PMID 23391497.
  12. ^ a b "Professor Alison Etheridge FRS". People. Magdalen College Oxford. Retrieved 3 February 2024.
  13. ^ Etheridge, A. M.; Finnis, M. W. (1985). "Instability of the rate equations for creep coupled to swelling". Journal of Nuclear Materials. 132 (3): 277–283. Bibcode:1985JNuM..132..277E. doi:10.1016/0022-3115(85)90372-1.
  14. ^ "Professor Alison Etheridge FRS". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2 May 2015.
  15. ^ "Notices" (PDF). University of Oxford Gazette. 150 (5257): 116–117. 14 November 2019.
  16. ^ "Main panel B full membership list" (PDF). Research Excellence Framework. 30 April 2021. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  17. ^ "IMS Fellows 2016". Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Archived from the original on 10 January 2017.
  18. ^ "Current officials". Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Archived from the original on 31 October 2016.
  19. ^ "2017 LMS prize winners announced". aperiodical.com. The Aperiodical. 16 July 2017. Retrieved 2017-07-17
  20. ^ "No. 61962". The London Gazette (Supplement). 17 June 2017. p. B11.
  21. ^ "Honorary graduates 2018/19". The University of Edinburgh. 12 December 2018. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  22. ^ "Prominent statistician appointed to the board of EPSRC". rss.org.uk. Royal Statistical Society. 27 March 2018. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  23. ^ "Committees, Working Groups, and Councils". royalsociety.org. 2 December 2019. Retrieved 21 March 2022.
  24. ^ "Appointment of new CMS Chair". The Council for the Mathematical Sciences. 9 June 2021. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  25. ^ "New members". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 2023. Retrieved 21 April 2023.
  26. ^ "2023 NAS Election".

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