Matthew Stephens (statistician) facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Matthew Stephens
Alma mater	Magdalen College University of Oxford
Awards	Fellow of the Royal Society (2023)
Academic career
Institutions	University of Chicago University of Oxford
Thesis	Bayesian Methods for Mixtures of Normal Distributions
Doctoral advisor	Brian D. Ripley
Academic advisor	Peter Donnelly
Notable students	John Novembre

Matthew Stephens FRS (born 1970) 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 the Structure computer program, along with Jonathan Pritchard, which is used 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 (bronze) in 2006. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2023.