Michael Anthony Steel (born May 1960) is a New Zealand mathematician and statistician, a Distinguished Professor of mathematics and statistics
retrieved 2022-05-04. and the Director of the Biomathematics Research Centre at the

University of Canterbury The University of Canterbury ( mi, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha; postnominal abbreviation ''Cantuar.'' or ''Cant.'' for ''Cantuariensis'', the Latin name for Canterbury) is a public research university based in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was ...

in Christchurch, New Zealand.Curriculum vitae
retrieved 2012-03-07. He is known for his research on modeling and reconstructing evolutionary trees.

Biography

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 Massey University ( mi, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa) is a university based in Palmerston North, New Zealand, with significant campuses in Albany and Wellington. Massey University has approximately 30,883 students, 13,796 of whom are extramural or ...

, where he received his Ph.D. in 1989, supervised by Michael D. Hendy and David Penny. He joined the Canterbury faculty in 1994.

Awards and honours

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. 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." He became a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2003.Fellow biography
RSNZ, retrieved 2012-03-07. 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 Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

and

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

Selected publications

* Lockhart, Peter J., Michael A. Steel, Michael D. Hendy, and David Penny. "Recovering evolutionary trees under a more realistic model of sequence evolution." Molecular biology and evolution 11, no. 4 (1994): 605–612. * Esser, Christian, Nahal Ahmadinejad, Christian Wiegand, Carmen Rotte, Federico Sebastiani, Gabriel Gelius-Dietrich, Katrin Henze et al. "A genome phylogeny for mitochondria among α-proteobacteria and a predominantly eubacterial ancestry of yeast nuclear genes." Molecular Biology and Evolution 21, no. 9 (2004): 1643–1660. * Erdős, Péter L., Michael A. Steel, László A. Székely, and Tandy J. Warnow. "A few logs suffice to build (almost) all trees (I)." Random Structures & Algorithms 14, no. 2 (1999): 153–184. * Erdös, Péter L., Michael A. Steel, LászlóA Székely, and Tandy J. Warnow. "A few logs suffice to build (almost) all trees: part II." Theoretical Computer Science 221, no. 1-2 (1999): 77–118.

References

External links

Home page

Citations
on Google scholar {{DEFAULTSORT:Steel, Mike 1960 births Living people Phylogenetics researchers Computational phylogenetics New Zealand mathematicians New Zealand statisticians University of Canterbury alumni Massey University alumni University of Canterbury faculty Fellows of the Royal Society of New Zealand