View all news

Scott Harper, Heilbronn Fellow, awarded the gold medal at STEM for Britain Awards

9 March 2021

Congratulations to Scott Harper, Heilbronn Fellow, who was awarded the gold medal at STEM for Britain awards, an annual poster competition, open to early career researchers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

The overall aim of the competition is to encourage, support and promote Britain’s early career researcher.

Scott’s poster explaining his research on “Classifying Isolated Symmetries” was up against hundreds of entries from across the country.

Scott commented: “I am delighted that the poster on my research in group theory was awarded the Gold Medal. Mathematics is a beautiful and powerful subject, and it was a joy to communicate this to a range of scientists and parliamentarians at STEM for Britain.”

Scott’s research is in group theory, and lots of his work involves exploiting the fundamental role of simple groups, the building blocks of symmetry. Scott’s poster describes his recent work with Tim Burness and Robert Guralnick that classifies the finite groups where every element is contained in a generating pair. This has recently been published in the Annals of Mathematics.

Sir Peter Bottomley, the longest serving MP, chaired the Mathematical Sciences panel, and several other Members of Parliament attended, including Thangam Debbonaire, MP for Bristol West. Stephen Metcalfe MP, Chairman of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee who chaired the overall event said: “This annual competition is an important date in the parliamentary calendar because it gives MPs an opportunity to see the work of a wide range of the country’s best young researchers.”

As the gold medalist in the Mathematical Sciences category, Scott receives a prize of £1000, sponsored by the Clay Mathematics Institute, and he will attend an event in Westminster later in the year.

Many congratulations to Scott!

Edit this page