Jane Hillston appointed to the Turing’s Board of Trustees

The Board of Trustees, who are also the Turing’s directors, is the governing body of the Institute. The Board of Trustees is made up of independent members and one nominated trustee from each of our founding members.  

Jane is joining the Board of Trustees alongside Professor Anne Trefethen, from the University of Oxford.   

The Alan Turing Institute, headquartered in the British Library, London, was created as the national institute for data science in 2015. In 2017, artificial intelligence was added to their remit.   

The Institute is named in honour of Alan Turing, whose pioneering work in theoretical and applied mathematics, engineering and computing are considered to be the key disciplines comprising the fields of data science and artificial intelligence.  

Five founding universities – Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and Warwick – and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council created The Alan Turing Institute in 2015.  

Eight universities – Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Queen Mary University of London, Birmingham, Exeter, Bristol, and Southampton – joined the Institute in 2018.  

Jane Hillston is a Professor of Quantitative Modelling, Dean of Research Culture and REF, and former Head of the School of Informatics. In March 2007 she was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 2018, to the membership of the Academia Europaea. She is the recipient of the Suffrage Science Award for Computer Science and the RSE Lord Kelvin Medal. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2022.  

Jane is the first person to receive the three top awards from the British Computer Society – the Needham Award, the Distinguished Dissertation Award and recently the Lovelace Research Medal. She is known for her work on stochastic process algebras. In particular, she developed approaches to quantified verification, such as the PEPA process algebra, which support dynamic behaviour and resource use to be assessed. 

Jane is a strong advocate for equality, diversity, and inclusion and in 2023, she was awarded an MBE for her services to computer science and women in science.