Alison Etheridge is Professor of Probability at the University of Oxford where she holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics and a Fellowship at Magdalen College. She was an undergraduate at New College, and divided her graduate study between Oxford and McGill. She then held research fellowships in Oxford and Cambridge and positions in Berkeley, Edinburgh and Queen Mary University of London before returning to Oxford in 1997.

Over the course of her career, her interests have ranged from abstract mathematical problems to concrete applications as reflected in her four books which range from a research monograph on mathematical objects called superprocesses to an exploration (co-authored with Mark Davis) of the percolation of ideas from the groundbreaking thesis of Bachelier in 1900 to modern mathematical finance.

Much of her recent research is concerned with mathematical models of population genetics, where she has been particularly involved in efforts to understand the effects of spatial structure of populations on their patterns of genetic variation.