Catherine Greenhill

Catherine Greenhill is an Australian pure mathematician known for her research on random graphs, combinatorial enumeration and Markov chains. She is a professor of mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales. She then completed a Bachelor of Science (Hons) at the University of Queensland in 1991, followed by a Master of Science by research in 1992, supervised by Anne Penfold Street. She earned her Ph.D. in 1996 at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Peter M. Neumann.

Career After completing her PhD, she obtained a postdoctoral position at the University of Leeds where she worked on the analysis of combinatorial Markov chains and its computational complexity. In 2023, she was appointed Head of the Pure Mathematics Department at UNSW. Her main research interests lie in asymptotic, probabilistic and algorithmic combinatorics. a member of the editorial board for Random Structures & Algorithms and the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics, and a member of the editorial advisory board for Special Matrices. She has held positions on the Women in Mathematics Special Interest Group of the Australian Mathematical Society, the Council of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia, the Committee for Women in Mathematics and the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at UNSW. In 2025, she became the Mathematical Advisory Committee Chair for the Simon Marais Mathematics Competition

Awards and honours

In 2010, she received the Hall Medal of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications. In 2013, she was awarded the UNSW Faculty of Science June Griffith Fellowship for Academic Women in Leadership. In 2022, she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales.