Dr Rowena Paget

Rowena is Deputy Head of the School of Engineering, Mathematics and Physics. She joined the University of Kent as a lecturer in 2006, having previously worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Leicester and as a college lecturer at the University of Oxford. Her DPhil was in the area of representation theory of symmetric groups at Oxford, under the supervision of Dr Karin Erdmann. Before that she was an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford. 

Rowena led the School’s successful Athena Swan Silver application, having previously delivered the University’s first Silver departmental award in 2017. She is a member of University-level teams such as the Athena Swan Self-Assessment Team, the Wellbeing Committee and the APP Operational Group, as well as School committees.  She served as Deputy Director of Division 2020-2024. Rowena is an Athena Swan reviewer for Advance HE.

She is an active promoter of mathematics to schools and colleges across the South East, delivering outreach and widening participation events in schools, on campus and online. She runs the Royal Institution Mathematics Masterclass programme at Kent.    

• Representation theory of symmetric groups and related algebras including diagram algebras
• Plethysm, Foulkes’ Conjecture
• Algebraic combinatorics

Rowena’s previous research students are:

• David Brown (Some Problems Related to Plethysm, PhD 2023)
• Reuben Green (Some properties of Specht modules for the wreath product of symmetric groups, PhD 2019)
• Melanie de Boeck (On the structure of Foulkes’ modules for the symmetric group, PhD 2015)
• Mark Colligan (Some topics in the representation theory of Brauer algebras, PhD 2012)
• Claire Pollard (Foulkes’ Conjecture: current state and computations, MSc 2008)

Strong candidates with an interest in the representation theory of symmetric groups and related diagram algebras should contact me by email to discuss possible projects.   

• PGCHE, 2008, University of Kent 
  
• External examiner for Birkbeck (MSc in Mathematics), from 2017 
  
• PhD external examiner (at Oxford, Leeds) 
  
• Athena SWAN panellist 
  
• Member of the LMS 
  
• Outreach: Ri Primary Masterclasses