User:Madeleine.beekman/sandbox2

Mary Ruth Myerscough is an Associate Professor in Applied Mathematics at the University of Sydney's School of Mathematics and Statistics.

Education
Mary was born in Brighton UK and started her education at the Sacred Heart Convent in Edinburgh in 1967. Mary and her family moved to Australia at the end of 1968, to allow her father, Dr Peter Myerscough, to take up a position in the then School of Botany at the University of Sydney. Peter Myerscough stayed at the University of Sydney until his retirement in 1993. Mary was further educated at North Turramurra Public School (1969–1971), Hornsby Public School (1972 and 1973) and at Ku-ring-gai High School (1974–1979). Mary went on to do an undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney, graduating with first class honours in Applied Mathematics in 1983. After finishing a Master of Science by Research, also at the University of Sydney, she moved to Oxford University in 1985 from which she graduated with a DPhil in Mathematics in 1988. She returned to Sydney in 1988 to take up an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellowship in the School of Chemistry at Macquarie University. In 1990 she was appointed as Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Sydney where she has been ever since. Mary’s mother, Joan Myerscough (nee Bryce) had an Arts degree majoring in Mathematics.

Research
Mary’s main research interests are collective animal behaviour, in particular the behaviour of termites and honeybees, and atherosclerosis.

Collective behaviour
Mary developed mathematical models of nest architecture by termites, showing that the elaborate nests termites build can be explained by stigmergy. Unfortunately, termites do not easily lend themselves to experimental manipulation, so Mary shifted focus to honeybees so that her models could be directly tested, allowing for more realistic models. The questions she addressed dealt with the reasons why honeybee queens mate with many males (polyandry),  how bee colonies and swarms maintain a more or less constant temperature (thermoregulation), how honeybees organize their foraging,    the ways in which honeybee swarms select a new nest site,    and finally how swarms of honeybees are guided once the swarm is en route towards the nest site it has selected. Mary’s models translate the behaviour of the individual insects into the emergent behaviour of the collective.

Atherosclerosis
Mary’s research on atherosclerosis aims to understand how atherosclerotic plaques form by using ordinary differential and partial differential equations to model the non-linear interactions between cell density and concentrations of low-density lipoproteins (LDL), high-density lipoproteins (HDL) and cytokine concentrations within the innermost layer of the blood vessel wall. Atherosclerotic plaques are fatty accumulations that form in artery walls when LDL penetrates the blood vessel lining and initiates an immune response. Macrophages (white blood cells) respond, enter the vessel wall, consume LDL and become lipid-filled foam cells. Foam cells are either removed from the vessel wall or they die and form an extracellular deposit of fat and cellular debris covered by a fibrous cap. If the cap is fragile and breaks, then fat and cellular debris are released into the blood stream and cause heart attacks or strokes. Understanding how atherosclerotic plaques form is crucial in reducing death from cardiovascular disease. There is copious experimental work on atherosclerosis allowing mathematicians to use existing data to create mathematical models as a powerful new way of looking at the problem.