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 in

Christchurch Christchurch ( ; mi, Ōtautahi) is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand and the seat of the Canterbury Region. Christchurch lies on the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula on Pegasus Bay. The Avon Rive ...

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

evolutionary tree A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological spec ...

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, where he received his Ph.D. in 1989, supervised by Michael D. Hendy and

David Penny Edward David Penny CNZM FRSNZ (born 1939 in Taumarunui) is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist from New Zealand. He has researched the nature of evolutionary transformations, and is widely published in the fields of phylogenetic tree, g ...

. He joined the Canterbury faculty in 1994.

Awards and honours

Steel won the Hamilton Memorial Prize of the

Royal Society of New Zealand Royal may refer to: People * Royal (name), a list of people with either the surname or given name * A member of a royal family Places United States * Royal, Arkansas, an unincorporated community * Royal, Illinois, a village * Royal, Iowa, a c ...

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 The New Zealand Mathematical Society is a New Zealand based learned society of mathematicians. It is listed by the Royal Society of New Zealand as the affiliate organisation responsible for mathematics research, and by the International Mathematical ...

"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 A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

International Society for Computational Biology The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Mole ...

, for his outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.

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