Professor Ulrike Tillmann FRS
mathematician; director, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences; fellow, Alan Turing Institute

Ulrike Tillmann is a mathematician who has worked in topology, K-theory and non-commutative geometry. Her well-known work on moduli spaces has been motivated by problems in quantum physics and string theory, while some of her recent work in applied topology addresses challenges in data science.

Born in Germany, Ulrike attended her local grammar school. With the help of a Wien Scholarship, she studied at Brandeis University, and later received her PhD from Stanford University. Following a postdoctoral position in Cambridge, she spent most of her career in Oxford and at Merton College. Currently, she is NM Rothschild and Sons Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, president of the London Mathematical Society, and vice-president of the International Mathematical Union.

For her outstanding research, Ulrike was awarded the Whitehead Prize in Mathematics (in 2004) and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize (in 2008), and she was also elected a fellow of the Royal Society (in 2008), an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society (in 2012), and a member of the Leopoldina (in 2017). She has been a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute since it was established in 2015, and currently she serves on scientific boards of several international institutions, including the Austrian Science Fund.

Ulrike was a member of the Council of the Royal Society from 2017-2020, during which time she also served as interim vice-president. She has been chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee since 2020.

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