Heather Harrington obtained her PhD in 2010 from the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London. She joined the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford in 2013 as a Hooke Research Fellow and EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellow and was affiliated with St Cross College and Keble College.
Heather Harrington was promoted to Professor of Mathematics in
2020. She now has affiliations with St John’s College as a
Research Fellow in Mathematics and the Sciences and the Wellcome
Centre for Human Genetics an Associate Group Leader. Her
research focuses on the problem of reconciling models and data
by extracting information about the structure of models and the
shape of data. She develops methods relying on techniques from
computational algebraic geometry and topology to study complex
biological systems. She is the Co-Director of the Centre for
Topological Data Analysis. She has been recognised for her
research with a Royal Society University Research Fellowship,
London Mathematical Society Whitehead Prize, University of
Cambridge Adams Prize, and a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Mathematics and Statistics.