Jane Hillston


Jane Elizabeth Hillston is British professor of Quantitative Modelling and Head of School in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Early life and education

Hillston received a BA in Mathematics from the University of York in 1985, an MSc in Mathematics from Lehigh University in the United States in 1987 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1994, where she has spent her subsequent academic career. Her PhD thesis was awarded the BCS/CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Awards in 1995 and has been published by Cambridge University Press.

Research and career

She has been an EPSRC Research Fellow, Lecturer, Reader and Professor of Quantitative Modelling since 2006. Hillston is a member of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at Edinburgh. In 2018 she was appointed Head of the School of Informatics at Edinburgh, taking over from Johanna Moore.
Jane Hillston is known for her work on stochastic process algebras. In particular, she has developed the PEPA process algebra, and helped develop Bio-PEPA, which is based on the earlier PEPA algebra and is specifically aimed at analyzing biochemical networks.
Hillston serves in the editorial board of Logical Methods in Computer Science; Elsevier Theoretical Computer Science, as one of the editors in the area of Theory of Natural Computing, and as an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation.

Awards

In 2004, she received the first Roger Needham Award at the Royal Society in London awarded yearly for a distinguished research contributor in computer research by a UK-based researcher within ten years of their PhD. In March 2007 she was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2018, Hillston was elected the membership of the Academia Europaea. In 2018 she was a recipient of the Suffrage Science Award for Computer Science.
She led the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics in applying for an Athena SWAN Award, which they subsequently achieved silver in. The award shows that the department provides a "supportive environment" for female students.