Jane Hillston receives MBE at Buckingham Palace

Jane was honoured in the first King’s Birthday Honours List for her services to computer science and to women in science. 

Jane Hillston is a Professor of Quantitative Modelling. She holds a BA in Mathematics from the University of York, an MSc in Mathematics from Lehigh University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh. She is known for her work on stochastic process algebras. In particular, she has developed the PEPA process algebra, and helped develop Bio-PEPA, which is based on the earlier PEPA algebra and is specifically aimed at analysing biochemical networks. 

In 2004, she received the first Roger Needham Award at the Royal Society in London awarded yearly for a distinguished research contributor in computer research by a UK-based researcher within ten years of their PhD. 

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. In 2022 she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, one of only five female fellows whose research falls into broad computer science or computational sciences fields. 

More than 1,000 recipients have been awarded honours for their outstanding contributions across all sectors and parts of the UK.