After initially work on population genetics theory of recombination, of migration, and of speciation, his main focus has been on phylogenetic inference. He showed that certain shapes of the true evolutionary tree, widely used “parsimony” methods were strongly biased. He developed dynamic programming methods for inferring the tree by maximum likelihood, and he applied the bootstrap method of statistics to inferring trees. He wrote the central paper introducing phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate whether different characters have evolved in a correlated way.
His free program package PHYLIP made these methods available. His book "Inferring Phylogenies" (2004) explained many methods.
His honours have included membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Weldon Prize and Medal for biometry, the Darwin-Wallace medal from the Linnean Society, the International Prize for Biology from Japan. He has an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.
Professional position
- Professor Emeritus, Department of Genome Science, University of Washington
- Professor Emeritus, Department of Biology, University of Washington
