Matthew Stephens (statistician)


Matthew Stephens is a Bayesian statistician and professor in the departments of Human Genetics and Statistics at the University of Chicago. 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 as a postdoctoral researcher.

Career

Stephens conducted postdoctoral research with Peter Donnelly 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. He then went on to develop the influential Li and Stephens model as an efficient model for linkage disequilibrium.

Awards

Stephens was awarded the Guy Medal in 2006.