We are delighted to welcome Professor Dame Alison Etheridge to the School as part of our 2024-25 Sir Harrie Massey Colloquia Series.

Professor Dame Etheridge will deliver a lecture titled 'The Forwards and Backwards of Population Models'. An abstract and biography can be found below.

Abstract:

What can we infer about the history of a population from the patterns of genetic variation that we observe today? There is a long history of mathematical modelling of the demographic dynamics of a population and their effect on the genetic relationships between individuals sampled from that population. Because patterns of genetic variation are laid down over very long timescales, one expects that local details of reproduction and dispersal will not be important, and can be replaced by some `average' behaviour. Very often modellers simply write down a reaction-diffusion equation, without ever considering what is happening at the individual level. Here we lay out a broad class of individual based models that might describe how spatially heterogeneous populations live, die and reproduce. This class is particularly well suited to modelling plant populations. In particular, a novelty of our approach is that we explicitly model a juvenile phase, which, as we illustrate with a toy example, could have important implications for quantities that we might try to infer from genetic data.

Biography:

Alison Etheridge is Professor of Probability at the University of Oxford where she holds a joint appointment in the Mathematical Institute and the Department of Statistics. She has previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Edinburgh; and Queen Mary University of London. Over the course of her career, Alison’s research interests have ranged from abstract mathematical problems to concrete applications with her recent work focussed on mathematical modelling of population genetics.   She was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015 and an International Member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States in 2023. She is the founding President of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences.