Oxford Mathematician Heather Harrington has been awarded a Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society (LMS) for her outstanding contributions to mathematical biology which have generated new biological insights using novel applications of topological and algebraic techniques.
In the words of the citation Heather "has made significant advances through the application of ideas originating in pure mathematics to biological problems for which the techniques of traditional applied mathematics are inadequate. This has involved in particular the development of methods in algebraic statistics which allow one to characterize the qualitative behaviour of dynamical systems and networks, adapting approaches from algebraic geometry to test whether a given mathematical model is commensurate with a given set of experimental observations."