Florence Nightingale Day

The Florence Nightingale Days are part of our continuing efforts to promote mathematical sciences and especially the participation of women in those subjects.

The Florence Nightingale Days are part of our continuing efforts to promote mathematical sciences to young women in years 10 and above, who will soon be making crucial choices in their career paths. The Florence Nightingale Day will showcase successful women in mathematics at various stages of their careers, display information about the broad range of possibilities offered by a degree in mathematics or statistics, stimulate informal discussion between pupils and mathematicians and give an opportunity for participants to compare their mathematical skills with their peers in other schools via a quiz.

While Florence Nightingale is well-known for her medical work as a nurse, she was also a pioneer in statistics, especially in the use of visualisation of statistical data. A description of this work may be found in her biography on the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, along with a large number of biographies of other female mathematicians.

Florence Nightingale Day 2026

Wednesday 7th January, 10:00-15:00, Lancaster University, Management School (West Pavillion)

To sign up for a school group, teachers should complete this registration form.

For enquiries contact Dr Sean Prendiville (s.prendiville@lancaster.ac.uk).

Provisional Timetable

09.30-10.00: Registration
10.00-10.05: Introduction
10.05-10.50: Talk 1
10.50-11.10: Refreshments
11.10-12.20: Maths quiz!
12.20-13.00: Lunch break
13.00-13.45: Talk 2
13.45-14.00: Results of the quiz and prizes; break
14.00-14.45: Talk 3
14.45-15.00: Closing comments, thank you gifts and feedback

Dr Alice Peng

Qiyao (Alice) Peng is a Lecturer in Section of Mathematics for AI in Real-World System (MARS) at the School of Mathematical Sciences at Lancaster University. She obtained her PhD at Delft University of Technology and then continued her postdoc at Leiden University in Netherlands. Prior to the lectureship, she was a teacher in Bioinformatics Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focusing on mathematical biology, using mathematical modelling to reveal and then reproduce the biological phenomenon, particularly in wound healing, cancer cell metastasis, wildfire propagation and focused ultrasound and microbubble treatment for drug delivery. Furthermore, she is interested in searching for mathematical connections between models that describe the same biological phenomena but at different scales.

Dr Jess Jay

Jess Jay is a Lecturer in Security and Protection Science at Lancaster University’s School of Mathematical Sciences. She earned her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Bristol under the supervision of Professor Márton Balázs. Before starting a Lectureship at Lancaster University, Jess was a Heilbronn Fellow at the University of Bristol. Jess’s main research interests are in Probability Theory and links to other areas of pure Mathematics. In particular, her work concerns Interacting Particle Systems and Combinatorial identities. Interacting particle systems are probabilistic models motivated by physical phenomena such as particle physics, traffic flow and queuing theory. She also has an interest in the role of Mathematics in Cyber Security and is currently working with colleagues at Lancaster to develop post-quantum e-voting systems. Alongside her research Jess also has a passion for sharing interesting mathematical concepts with wider audiences and enjoys speaking at public and school events in the local area.

Dr Jess Bridgen

Jess Bridgen is a Lecturer in Mathematics and AI at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on developing machine learning methods to model the spread of infectious diseases. Jess has experience modelling human and livestock diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jess was seconded to the UK Health Security Agency to assist with the pandemic response, gaining first-hand experience of the public health response for COVID-19 and Mpox.

Previous events

You can find information about previous years' Florence Nightingale Days here: