Athena Swan Lecture 2026

Title

From chalk to chat: mathematics in a changing landscape.

Synopsis

It is easy to forget the technological milestones of the past few decades. In this lecture, Alison Etheridge charts some of the changes that have taken place over the course of her career before looking ahead to the massive opportunities and questions raised by the rise of AI.

Speaker

Professor Dame Alison Etheridge DBE OBE FRS is a Professor of Probability at the University of Oxford and President of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences. She was Head of the Department of Statistics at Oxford from 2019 to 2022.

Her research spans probability theory and its applications, with a particular focus on infinite-dimensional stochastic processes and mathematical problems arising in population genetics. Her recent work explores the mathematical modelling of genetic and evolutionary processes, including how spatial structure interacts with genetic variation.

Alison was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015 and an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2023. She has held a number of senior leadership roles across the mathematical sciences and was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to the mathematical sciences in the 2025 New Year Honours.