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 in the School of Botany and Zoology 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 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 on 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.
This is 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.