Prof. David Balding University of Melbourne, Australia, and University College London, UK

David Balding was educated in his native Australia before coming to the UK to study for a PhD in mathematics at the University of Oxford. He then held a junior academic post at Oxford for a year before moving successively to Queen Mary London, the University of Reading, Imperial College... read moreLondon and University College London. After 30 years in the UK, in 2014 he returned to Australia where he is Professor of Statistical Genetics in the Schools of Bioscience and of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne. David researches a broad range of mathematical and statistical problems in genetics – evolutionary, population and medical. He has also developed widely-adopted methods of analysis for the interpretation of forensic DNA profiles, summarized in his monograph Weight-of-Evidence for Forensic DNA Profiles (Wiley, 2005). On occasions, he acts as an expert witness for cases involving complex DNA profile evidence. In population and evolutionary genetics, David has developed statistical methods for drawing inferences about the demographic history of populations from DNA data, and for identifying loci that appear to have been affected by recent, strong selection. He has participated in the design and analysis of genome-wide association studies, for disease and drug response phenotypes as well as normal variation, in humans and other organisms. Much of his statistical genetics work involves computer-intensive stochastic algorithms, and often within the Bayesian paradigm of statistical inference. David has been editor of the Handbook of Statistical Genetics (Wiley, 3rd ed 2007) and the Handbook of Statistical Systems Biology (Wiley 2011).