simonho.org

I am interested in molecular evolution and phylogenetics, which involves a combination of molecular biology, palaeontology, statistics, and computer science. Most of my research falls under the broad category of bioinformatics, but it also encompasses the more traditional fields of zoology and palaeontology.

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Evolutionary Phyloinformatics laboratory in the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University. I am also a member of the Centre for Macroevolution and Macroecology. My current research covers a range of issues, including rates of molecular evolution, techniques for calibrating rate estimates, and the factors that drive variation in molecular evolutionary rates.

I will be moving to the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney as a Senior Lecturer in April 2010.

I am a member of the Australasian Evolution Society, the Genetics Society of Australasia, the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and The Australian Museum Society. I am serving on the editorial board of the journal Mitochondrial DNA.

My CV can be downloaded as a PDF file here.

 

I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre and the Evolutionary Biology Group, in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, and an Associate Researcher at Balliol College. My research dealt with molecular evolution in domesticated animals, with a particular focus on cows and related species. My other research interests included relaxed-clock models implemented in a Bayesian framework, and accounting for uncertainty in the fossil record in the estimation of the divergence dates of different species.

I completed my D.Phil. degree in mid-2006, which was supervised by Andrew Rambaut, Alan Cooper, Alexei Drummond, and Richard Fortey. I was a member of Linacre College throughout my doctorate. My work concerned rates of evolution at the molecular level, which vary among different sites in a gene, among different genes, and among different organisms. My thesis dealt with various aspects of rate estimation, including the performance of different methods to estimate rates and the divergence times among different species, as well as the roles of adaptive and stochastic processes in driving patterns of evolutionary rate variation.

This was the view from our laboratory in the Department of Zoology:

 

The research conducted towards my Master's degree at the University of Sydney was supervised by Lars Jermiin (School of Biological Sciences) and John Robinson (School of Mathematics and Statistics). It was primarily concerned with the performance of phylogenetic inference methods, the processes underlying molecular evolution, and the consistency of molecular and palaeontological data. My Master's thesis was published as a book, Confounding Factors in Phylogenetic Analysis, by VDM Verlag in 2008.