Heather Harrington


Heather A. Harrington is an applied mathematician interested in dynamical systems, chemical reaction network theory, topological data analysis, and systems biology. She is an associate professor of applied algebra and data science, and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, where she heads the Algebraic Systems Biology group.

Education and career

Harrington went to Concord-Carlisle High School in Massachusetts. As an applied mathematics student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst she won a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, and graduated summa cum laude from in 2006. She completed her Ph.D. in 2010 at Imperial College London. Her dissertation, Mathematical models of cellular decisions, was jointly supervised by Jaroslav Stark and Dorothy Buck.
After postdoctoral research in theoretical systems biology at Imperial from 2010 to 2013, she joined the Mathematical Institute at Oxford as Hooke Research Fellow and EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and as Junior Research Fellow at St Cross College, Oxford. In 2017, she became an associate professor and Royal Society University Research Fellow at Oxford.

Recognition

In 2018 Harrington was one of the winners of the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society. She was a co-winner of the 2019 Adams Prize of the University of Cambridge, which had the topic 'The Mathematics of Networks'.