Prof. Ulrike Tillmann  has worked broadly in topology, K-theory, and non-commutative geometry. Her work on the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and manifolds of higher dimensions has been inspired by problems in quantum physics and string theory, while new challenges in data science have motivated some of her recent work. 

After finishing school in Germany,  Tillmann  went to Brandeis University as a Wien International Scholar and  studied for her PhD under Ralph Cohen at Stanford University. She then worked with Graeme Segal at Cambridge University before she took a position in Oxford where she has been a professor since 2000.

Tillmann was awarded the Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society  in 2004 and the Bessel-Humboldt Forschungs Preis in 2008. She  was 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 is a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute since its beginning and serves on scientific boards of several international  institutions, including the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics  and the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF). Currently she is a member of  Council of the Royal Society where she also served as (interim) Vice-President in 2018. 

At present she is visiting MSRI as Chern Professor.