Jane Hillston is Professor of Quantitative Modelling in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science. Hillston received a BA and MS in Mathematics from the University of York (UK) and Lehigh University (USA), respectively. After a brief period working in industry, she received a PhD in computer science from the University of Edinburgh in 1994. Her work on the stochastic process algebra PEPA was recognised by the British Computer Society in 2004, which awarded her the first Roger Needham Award. She was elected to fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2007. Her principal research interests are in formal approaches to modelling the dynamic behaviour of systems, particularly performance modelling. Recently this has included making fluid approximations of discrete state systems to tackle the problems in state space explosion. She has also been working on the integration of inference into formal modelling based on process algebra.