Professor Dame Alison Etheridge (Statistics, Oxford University) visited Maths@Surrey today (Friday 7 March) and gave a Colloquium talk. Dame Alison is first President of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences and was also Chair of the Mathematical Sciences sub-panel of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). The title of her talk today was “The forwards and backwards of population models“. In her talk, she presented a broad class of models that might describe how spatially heterogeneous populations live, die and reproduce. This class is well suited to modelling plant populations. In particular, a novelty of the approach is that a juvenile phase is explicitly modelled, which, as is illustrated with a toy example, could have important implications for quantities that one might try to infer from genetic data. The photo below shows Dame Alison along with Ian Roulstone and Anne Skeldon, just before the talk. (Click on image to enlarge.)