| Citation | Professor Alison M Etheridge, Professor of Probability, Departments of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Oxford
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.
Original citation, subsequently updated reads;
' Alison Etheridge has made significant contributions both in the theory and the applications of probability. Her particular areas or research have been superprocesses and measure-valued diffusions; in theoretical population genetics; and in mathematicqal ecology. Her work is notable for the connections drawn between these areas. A recent exampoe is the devlopment of a new flexible framework for modelling evolution in a spatial continuum, incorporating large-scale extinction-recolonisation events explicitly. Such events occur in the demographic history of humans and other species because of the effects of climate change, for example. The model also provides a consistent backwards in time description for the evolution of lineages ancestral to a sample, as well as being of considerable intrinsic mathematical interest. ' |