PhD in Genetics, 1998
University of Cambridge
BA in Physics and Theoretical Physics, 1995
University of Cambridge
In the 80’s, as an 8-bit game developer, I became interested in artificial life. In the 90’s I studied physics, then did a PhD on molecular evolution of transposons in the nematode genome, advised by Richard Durbin at the Sanger Institute. Then I came to Berkeley (via Los Alamos) to think about RNA.
In 2004 I moved from my first faculty job at Oxford’s Department of Statistics (2002-2004) to join the faculty on UC Berkeley, going from a postdoc on an exchange visa (1999-2002) to co-chair of the Bioengineering PhD program (2019-23).
My Berkeley group’s research has spanned a broad range of algorithm and tool development for bioinformatics, often relating to molecular evolution and comparative genomics.