Matthew Stephens (born 1970) is a Bayesian statistician and professor in the departments of Human Genetics and Statistics at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

. He is known for the Li and Stephens model as an efficient coalescent.

Education

Stephens has a PhD from Magdalen College, Oxford University where his advisor was Brian D. Ripley. He then went on to work with

Peter Donnelly Sir Peter James Donnelly (born 15 May 1959) is an Australian-British mathematician and Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Oxford, and the CEO of Genomics PLC. He is a specialist in applied probability and has made contribut ...

as a postdoctoral researcher.

Career

Stephens conducted postdoctoral research with

at the University of Oxford. It was there that he developed STRUCTURE along with Jonathan Pritchard, a widely used computer program for determining population structure and estimating individual

admixture Admixture may refer to: * Genetic admixture, the result of interbreeding between two or more previously isolated populations within a species * Racial admixture, admixture between humans, also referred to as miscegenation * Hybrid * Mixture, the ch ...

. He then went on to develop the influential Li and Stephens model as an efficient model for

linkage disequilibrium In population genetics, linkage disequilibrium (LD) is the non-random association of alleles at different loci in a given population. Loci are said to be in linkage disequilibrium when the frequency of association of their different alleles is h ...

Awards

Stephens was awarded the

Guy Medal The Guy Medals are awarded by the Royal Statistical Society in three categories; Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Silver and Bronze medals are awarded annually. The Gold Medal was awarded every three years between 1987 and 2011, but is awarded bienni ...

(Bronze) in 2006.

Notes

1970 births British statisticians Population geneticists Statistical geneticists Living people 20th-century British mathematicians 21st-century British mathematicians Genetic epidemiologists {{UK-statistician-stub