Alison Etheridge

Alison Etheridge
File:Alison-Mary-Etheridge-FRS.jpg Alison Etheridge in 2015, portrait via the Royal Society
Born	Alison Mary Etheridge (1964-04-27) 27 April 1964 Wolverhampton
Fields	Probability Population genetics Mathematical ecology
Institutions	University of Oxford University of Cambridge University of California, Berkeley University of Edinburgh Queen Mary University of London
Alma mater	University of Oxford (DPhil)
Thesis	Asymptotic Behaviour of Some Measure-Valued Diffusions (1989)
Doctoral advisor	David Albert Edwards
Doctoral students	Nic Freeman Mark Meredith Anja Sturm Amandine Véber
Notable awards	FRS (2015)
Website www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~etheridg www.maths.ox.ac.uk/people/alison.etheridge

Alison Mary Etheridge (born 1964) FRS is Professor of Probability at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.

Education

Etheridge was educated at the University of Oxford where she was awarded a DPhil in 1989 for research supervised by David Albert Edwards.

Career and research

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.

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.

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.

Awards and honours

Etheridge was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015. Her certificate of election reads:

Alison Etheridge has made significant contributions in the theory and applications of probability and in the links between them. Her particular areas of research have been in measure-valued processes (especially superprocesses and their generalisations); in theoretical population genetics; and in mathematical ecology. 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. 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. 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. 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.