Honorary Professor of Statistical Genomics, Melbourne Integrative Genomics (MIG)
I have taken early retirement from U Melbourne (June 2021), but continue many academic activities in my role as honorary. I don’t plan to take on any more students and will start to wind down other activities, though so far in retirement I have submitted more papers than when I was on full pay.
MIG and I are both 50/50 in the School of BioSciences and the School of Mathematics & Statistics. I also am honorary at the UCL Genetics Institute in London, where I was based full time from 2009 to 2014.
My educational background is in maths (D Phil Mathematics, Oxford 1990) and since then I have worked to develop and apply mathematical/ statistical/ computational methods and ideas in genetics and genomics, including:
- mathematical modelling of
- ancestry and relatedness,
- demographic history of populations,
- evolutionary processes such as mechanisms of selection;
- statistical methods for the evaluation of forensic DNA profile evidence;
- measuring relatedness and its role in genomics analyses, including association studies;
- heritability and the genomic architecture of complex traits;
- predicting phenotypes from genotype and other data;
- analysis of other omics data (transcriptome, methylome, etc) together with genomics data.
I have worked with collaborators in many different fields, on genetic aspects of forensic science, crop research, ancient DNA, drug development and disease. I have consulted with government and industry in many areas, most often relating to DNA profile evidence. I also played a key role in synthesising and evaluating the evidence for certain bones found under a car park to be those of English king Richard III.
- I am President-elect of the International Genetic Epidemiology Society for 2022.
- I’m Section Editor for Methods at PLOS Genetics: send us your best new research in computational/statistical genetics; we’ve got a great team of expert editors and reviewers.
- See my new review on Y and mtDNA profile evaluation in Genes, with Mikkel Andersen, Aalborg University. We also produced a series of 5 webinars on a radical new approach to the forensic evaluation of Y-chromosome DNA profiles .
- View my ACEMS public lecture How to evaluate evidence in a criminal courtroom presented in May 2020.
- Marvel at the print or online versions of the Handbook of Statistical Genomics, 4th ed, 2019: 30 chapters from world-leading experts, co-editors Ida Moltke (Copenhagen) and John Marioni (Cambridge).
- Hear the podcast Weighing Up Evidence in Criminal Courts and at a King’s Burial Site episode 15 of the ACEMS “Random Sample” series (recorded 2019).
- Read my book (with Chris Steele) Weight‐of‐Evidence for Forensic DNA Profiles, 2nd ed, 2015.
Some key words for my research:
• Computational statistics
• Epidemiology and Biostatistics
• Evaluation of forensic DNA profiles
• Evolutionary Genetics
• Genetic Epidemiology
• Population Genetics
• Population Genetics
Please see the menu at the top right of the page for links to further details of my research.