Mathematician Heather Harrington is the new Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics

Heather Harrington joins the team of directors at the Max Planck Institute (MPI-CBG) in Dresden. In her position, she will also lead the inter-institutional Centre for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD) together with partners from the Technical University of Dresden and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems. She has also been appointed as an honorary professor at the Faculty of Mathematics at TU Dresden. Her vision includes the development of new mathematical approaches to gain additional knowledge of living systems and to understand how they self-organise across different orders of magnitude. She is also Professor of Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, UK, and a Fellow of St John's College Oxford.

„We are delighted that Heather Harrington has decided to join our Board of Directors,

says Anne Grapin-Botton, Executive Director of the MPI-CBG. „We are able to collect a wealth of data and information about biological systems, and Heather's mathematical approach will be crucial in drawing structure and meaning from this information. Heather is a talented mathematician who will undoubtedly find new ways to solve current and future challenges in biology, which is why we are so excited.

„I am delighted to now be part of the Max Planck Society and to be a Director at the MPI-CBG and the CSBD,“ says Heather Harrington. „We will develop new mathematical frameworks to model and analyse the detailed and multidimensional data we generate with modern biology. We will develop and apply non-linear algebra technologies to analyse complex spatio-temporal systems and computational topology methods to study the shape and structure of high-dimensional data. I can't wait to discover new opportunities to collaborate with researchers at the institute and in the broader research landscape of TU Dresden and Saxony."

Heather's research group will develop mathematical approaches to understand biological systems at different levels, from genes to tissues. Due to the abstract nature of mathematics, the methods Heather and her team will develop can be applied to many different systems and contexts. The possibilities for understanding disease in a new light are enormous.

Heather has always been enthusiastic about applying new mathematical methods to biological and medical questions. She says: „I have been combining mathematical models with biological data throughout my career. Now it is clear that there is a huge untapped potential to understand the shape and structure of biological data. By characterising the multilevel and multidimensional relationships between different types of data more formally, we can better understand organisms at different levels.

Heather A. Harrington received her PhD from the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London in 2010. After postdoctoral years at Imperial College London and the Mathematical Institute at Oxford, she became an Associate Professor and Royal Society University Research Fellow at Oxford in 2017, where she was appointed Professor of Mathematics in 2020. She is a member of St John's College as a Research Fellow in Mathematics and Science and the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics as an Associate Research Group Leader. In October 2023, Heather joined the MPI-CBG and the Centre for Systems Biology Dresden as Director. Her research interests include applied algebra, dynamical systems, networks, topological data analysis and systems biology. Her research group develops mathematical approaches to research problems in the natural and medical sciences. She received several prestigious awards such as the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2018 or the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2020, for advances in analysing noisy data. She was co-winner of the 2019 Adams Prize from the University of Cambridge.

Press release by "idw - Informationsdienst Wissenschaft" from 13 November 2023