Frances Kirwan

Dame Frances Kirwan DBE FRS
Kirwan in 2009
Born	1959 (age 57–58)
Nationality	British
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Oxford
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	Michael Atiyah
Notable awards	Whitehead Prize (1989) Senior Whitehead Prize (2013)

Dame Frances Clare Kirwan, DBE FRS (born 1959) is a British mathematician, currently a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. Her fields of specialisation are algebraic and symplectic geometry.

Kirwan was educated at Oxford High School, and studied maths as an undergraduate at Clare College in the University of Cambridge. She took a D.Phil at Oxford in 1984, with the dissertation title The Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry, which was supervised by Michael Atiyah.

Kirwan's research interests include moduli spaces in algebraic geometry, geometric invariant theory (GIT), and in the link between GIT and moment maps in symplectic geometry. Her work endeavours to understand the structure of geometric objects by investigation of their algebraic and topological properties. She introduced the Kirwan map. From 1983-85 she held a Junior Fellowship at Harvard. From 1983-86 she held a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, before later becoming a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She is an honorary fellow at Clare College, Cambridge.