Congratulations to Arkady Wey AMIMA, Jenny Power and Chris Hickey who won the Mathematical Sciences Awards at STEM for Britain. Their posters were presented to politicians and a panel of expert judges in the House of Commons on 6 March 2023.
Stephen Metcalfe MP, Chair of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee (P&SC) which sponsors the mathematics awards, said:
This annual competition is an important date in the parliamentary calendar because it gives MPs an opportunity to speak to a wide range of the country’s best young researchers.
Arkady Wey (University of Oxford) won gold and the £1500 prize for his poster on A Multiscale Mathematical Model for Filtration. Arkady said:
I’m surprised and thrilled. I’m very near to the end of my PhD, and I applied for this competition as a way of rounding off my studies and presenting my research. My main feeling is one of pride that my work has been recognised on this platform. I’m less interested in maths for maths’ sake, and I want to produce something with real world, social impact. Today feels like a great success.
Jenny Power (University of Bath) won silver and a £1000 prize for her research Making Cancer Treatments Safer with Mathematics. Jenny said:
I am a big advocate for good and effective scientific communication. I believe posters are a perfect medium to showcase research in a fun and accessible way. With my poster, I want to demonstrate the impact maths can have on improving the lives of people, with my work specifically focusing on healthcare, and why research in mathematical sciences is so vital.
Chris Hickey (Arup) won bronze and a £750 prize for his work on Seismic Simulations: Implementing and Improving a New Dynamic Structural Analysis. Chris said:
It’s fantastic to be recognised for my research, and it’s particularly pleasing that I was commended on how well I’d designed and presented my poster. This competition really highlights the importance of communication in mathematics.
Mathematics finalist Julia A. Meister (University of Brighton) was awarded bronze in the Dyson Sustainability Awards for her poster on Net Zero NHS: Modelling Hidden Emissions of a Sustainable Medical Device Economy. The winners for this award were picked from across all five STEM categories of the competition.
Professor Ulrike Tillmann FRS FIMA, speaking on behalf of the Council for the Mathematical Sciences, said:
The physicist Eugene Wigner famously commented on the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’. So when we are looking for new and powerful ideas in the new fields of data science, and we are faced with difficult problems in medicine, national security, and artificial intelligence it is more than likely that the mathematical sciences will be a fundamental part of the solution.
For all the winning posters from early career researchers at STEM for Britain, see Stem for Britain 2023 Winners.
