Cheryl Praeger AM FAA is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Western Australia and was foundation Director of UWA’s Centre for Mathematics of Symmetry and Computation. She works on the mathematics of symmetry, exploiting deep theory about the finite simple groups to solve group theoretic, combinatorial, geometric, and computational problems.

Educated in Brisbane, Australia, she completed her doctorate at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is currently Foreign Secretary of the Australian Academy of Science, and has served on the Executive of the International Mathematical Union. She was the first woman President of the Australian Mathematical Society, and in 2015 she became the first mathematician to be inducted into the Western Australian Science Hall of Fame.