Dr Francesca Iezzi

Mathematics Engagement Officer

  • The University of Edinburgh

Contact details

Address

Street

Room 6315
James Clerk Maxwell Building
The King's Buildings
Peter Guthrie Tait Road

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH9 3FD

Biography

Background

I am the Public Engagement Officer for the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh.

My tasks include:

 - Leading and coordinating the outreach activities of the School (i. e. all activities aimed at communicating the School’s research and sharing our passion for Mathematics with the wider community)

- Coordinating the Mathematics Outreach Team, leading students' skills development, supervising undergraduate projects which focus on Maths Communication

- Designing and running activities for the public and producing educational resources

 

Below are some educational resources I produced:

- Have Fun with Maths-  a series of educational resources for primary or secondary schools:  https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/have-fun-with-maths

- Maths Week at Work- a series of videos for secondary school students promoting the beauty and  applicability of Mathematics. Visit this page for further details and to watch the videos.

 

To find out more about the activities I coordinate, please visit: https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/school-of-mathematics/outreach

 

I was formerly a PhD student at the University of Warwick, under the supervision of Brian Bowditch, graduating in 2016.

After completing my PhD I was an Early Career Fellow at Warwick Institute of Advanced Study and Warwick Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning. During that time I developed an interest for pedagogy and education, in particular for questions concerning interdisciplinarity and the link between research and teaching in Higher Education.

Research summary

I am currently interested in questions concerning Mathematics Outreach, Mathematics Education and Science Communication.

Past research interests

My PhD research was in Geometric Topology. In particular, I was working on questions concerning surface mapping class groups and outer automorphism groups of free groups. As a fellow at the Warwick Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning I worked on a project concerning the research-teaching nexus. In particular, I investigated examples of research-led teaching at Warwick, across different departments.

- (With Brian. H. Bowditch), Projections of the sphere graph to the arc graph of a surface; Journal of Topology and Analysis (2018)

- Sphere systems, standard form, and cores of products of trees; Beyond Hyperbolicity, Cambridge University Press (2019)

- A New World… Out of Nothing: review of an interdisciplinary workshop; Exchanges: the Warwick research journal (2017)

- Maths Week at Work: Connecting Maths to Everiday Life; The Scottish Mathematical Council Journal (2019)

- The Life-Changing Magic of Numbers, a book review; London Mathematical Society Newsletter, November 2020

- Have Fun with Maths: Resources for Problem Solving; to appear in the Scottish Mathematical Council Journal

- Approaches to research-led teaching at the University of Warwick; in preparation

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