Professor Heather Harrington develops mathematical methods to study signalling pathways involved in systems and cancer biology. She is currently a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.

Her research focuses on the problem of reconciling models and data by extracting information about the structure of mathematical models and the shape of data. To develop these methods, Harrington integrates techniques from a variety of disciplines such as computational algebraic geometry and topology, statistics, optimization, network theory, and dynamical systems. She has mentored over 60 early career researchers. She has active collaborations with many experimentalists and industry partners, including three pharmaceutical companies.

Harrington has been awarded a number of prestigious prizes including an LMS Whitehead Prize ‘for her outstanding contributions to mathematical biology which have generated new biological insights using novel applications of topological and algebraic techniques’ (2018), The Adams Prize awarded by the University of Cambridge for ‘distinguished research in the Mathematical Sciences’ (2019), and the Philip Leverhulme prize for ‘early career researchers whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising’.