Michael Anthony Steel (born May 1960) is a New Zealand mathematician and statistician, a Distinguished Professor of mathematics and statistics [1] and the Director of the Biomathematics Research Centre at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. [2] He is known for his research on modeling and reconstructing evolutionary trees.
Steel studied at the University of Canterbury, earning a bachelor's degree in 1982, a masters in 1983, and a degree in journalism in 1985. He then moved to Massey University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1989, supervised by Michael D. Hendy and David Penny. [3] He joined the Canterbury faculty in 1994. [2]
Steel won the Hamilton Memorial Prize of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1994; this prize is given annually to a New Zealand mathematician for work done within five years of a Ph.D. [4]
In 1999 he won the research award of the New Zealand Mathematical Society "for his fundamental contributions to the mathematical understanding of phylogeny, demonstrating a capacity for hard creative work in combinatorics and statistics and an excellent understanding of the biological implications of his results." [5]
He became a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2003. [6]
In 2018, Steel was elected as a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, for his outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. [7]
In biology, phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups of organisms. These relationships are determined by phylogenetic inference methods that focus on observed heritable traits, such as DNA sequences, protein amino acid sequences, or morphology. The result of such an analysis is a phylogenetic tree—a diagram containing a hypothesis of relationships that reflects the evolutionary history of a group of organisms.
Charadriiformes is a diverse order of small to medium-large birds. It includes about 390 species and has members in all parts of the world. Most charadriiform birds live near water and eat invertebrates or other small animals; however, some are pelagic (seabirds), others frequent deserts, and a few are found in dense forest. Members of this group can also collectively be referred to as shorebirds.
Temple Ferris Smith is an emeritus professor in biomedical engineering who helped to develop the Smith-Waterman algorithm with Michael Waterman in 1981. The Smith-Waterman algorithm serves as the basis for multi sequence comparisons, identifying the segment with the maximum local sequence similarity, see sequence alignment. This algorithm is used for identifying similar DNA, RNA and protein segments. He was director of the BioMolecular Engineering Research Center at Boston University for twenty years and is now professor emeritus.
Quantitative comparative linguistics is the use of quantitative analysis as applied to comparative linguistics. Examples include the statistical fields of lexicostatistics and glottochronology, and the borrowing of phylogenetics from biology.
In mathematics and computer science, an unrooted binary tree is an unrooted tree in which each vertex has either one or three neighbors.
Bernard M. E. Moret is a Swiss-American computer scientist, an emeritus professor of Computer Science at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. He is known for his work in computational phylogenetics, and in particular for mathematics and methods for computing phylogenetic trees using genome rearrangement events.
Tandy Warnow is an American computer scientist and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is known for her work on the reconstruction of evolutionary trees, both in biology and in historical linguistics, and also for multiple sequence alignment methods.
Mark David Pagel FRS is an evolutionary biologist and professor. He heads the Evolutionary Biology Group at the University of Reading. He is known for comparative studies in evolutionary biology. In 1994, with his spouse, anthropologist Ruth Mace, Pagel pioneered the Comparative Method in Anthropology.
David Sankoff is a Canadian mathematician, bioinformatician, computer scientist and linguist. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of Ottawa, and is cross-appointed to the Biology Department and the School of Information Technology and Engineering. He was founding editor of the scientific journal Language Variation and Change (Cambridge) and serves on the editorial boards of a number of bioinformatics, computational biology and linguistics journals. Sankoff is best known for his pioneering contributions in computational linguistics and computational genomics. He is considered to be one of the founders of bioinformatics. In particular, he had a key role in introducing dynamic programming for sequence alignment and other problems in computational biology. In Pavel Pevzner's words, "[ Michael Waterman ] and David Sankoff are responsible for transforming bioinformatics from a ‘stamp collection' of ill-defined problems into a rigorous discipline with important biological applications."
Barbara Ruth Holland is a New Zealand born Australian scientist. She is a Professor of mathematics and member of the Theoretical Phylogenetics Group at the School of Mathematics & Physics at the University of Tasmania. Barbara is also a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture. She has made substantial contributions to the methods for reconstructing phylogenetic trees from DNA and protein sequence data. Holland has published over 50 journal articles, presented over 30 invited or keynote lectures, refereed five conference proceedings, 2 book chapters and 1 book review. She is a senior editor of the scientific journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Desmond Gerard Higgins is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College Dublin, widely known for CLUSTAL, a series of computer programs for performing multiple sequence alignment. According to Nature, Higgins' papers describing CLUSTAL are among the top ten most highly cited scientific papers of all time.
Luay K. Nakhleh (Arabic): لؤي نخله; born May 8, 1974) is a Palestinian-Israeli-American computer scientist and computational biologist who is the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, a professor of Computer Science and a professor of BioSciences at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
ISCB Fellowship is an award granted to scientists that the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) judges to have made “outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics”. As of 2019, there are 76 Fellows of the ISCB including Michael Ashburner, Alex Bateman, Bonnie Berger, Steven E. Brenner, Janet Kelso, Daphne Koller, Michael Levitt, Sarah Teichmann and Shoshana Wodak. See List of Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology for a comprehensive listing.
Daniel Mier Gusfield is an American computer scientist, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Gusfield is known for his research in combinatorial optimization and computational biology.
Gillian Thornley is a retired New Zealand mathematician.
Edward David Penny CNZM FRSNZ is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist from New Zealand. He has researched the nature of evolutionary transformations, and is widely published in the fields of phylogenetic tree, genetics and evolutionary biology. Penny's contributions to science have been recognised with several awards and honours, and acceptance into the National Academy of Sciences.
Mary Morgan-Richards is a New Zealand biologist, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the Massey University.
Katherine Snowden Pollard is the Director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. She was awarded Fellowship of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2020 and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2021 for outstanding contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics.
Katharina Theresia Huber is a German applied mathematician and mathematical biologist whose research concerns phylogenetic trees, evolutionary analysis, their mathematical foundations, and their mathematical visualization. She is an associate professor in the School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia in England, and the school's director of postgraduate research.
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