Professor of Probability in the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Oxford, Alison Etheridge, has been elected one of the 47 new Fellows and 10 new Foreign Members of the Royal Society.

According to the Royal Society’s website, “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.”

The Magdalen College Oxford website (Alison is a Magdalen Fellow by Special Election) states that Alison “became interested in the interface between probability and analysis, where she was particularly attracted by the way in which probabilistic arguments could be employed to provide untuitively appealing proofs of abstract results. … Drawn to study superprocesses by their rich and beautiful mathematical structure, she sees them as having provided a first taste of modelling biological populations… Most recently her central interest has been a collection of mathematical problems arising in theoretical population genetics.”