Category: News

  • Public lecture “Trees of Life: Do they exist?”

    Public lecture “Trees of Life: Do they exist?”

    In gave my inaugural lecture as Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London on 16th November 2022, the film of which can be viewed below. Inaugural lectures are a chance to give a personal view on one’s research field, at a level that will be understood by the whole university and the […]

  • A genetic basis for COVID susceptibility

    A genetic basis for COVID susceptibility

    A paper published yesterday supports a hypothesis that Richard Nichols and I made in March 2020. We published an article in The Conversation arguing that we need to know if someone’s chances of severe COVID symptoms are affected by their genes. We suggested: “It may be that just one or two genes are involved. Perhaps […]

  • Could we predict personal coronavirus risk from our DNA?

    Could we predict personal coronavirus risk from our DNA?

    This article, co-authored with my colleague Prof. Richard Nichols, was published at The Conversation on 17th March 2020. Since then, Science has published a news article about efforts to do the type of studies that we advocated. NB. This is not about testing to see if we have coronavirus – this is about testing how […]

  • Babbage Podcast (The Economist) interview on tree health

    Just before Christmas, I was interviewed by Howie Shannon for The Economist’s “Babbage” podcast. Here it is!

  • Marcus Wallenberg Prize 2017

    Last week in Stockholm the forest geneticist Prof. Ron Sederoff was awarded the Marcus Wallenberg Prize. Informally known as the “Nobel Prize for Forestry”, this two million Swedish Krona award is presented by the King of Sweden each year. It is the first time for a decade that the prize has gone to a biologist. […]

  • Darwin’s abominable mystery

    One of the hidden gems of Royal Botanic Gardens Kew is its library. I spent several happy hours there researching a recent letter to Nature Ecology and Evolution, published in June under the title “The deepening of Darwin’s abominable mystery“. The brightest moment came when a helpful librarian found me an 1838 reprint of a […]

  • Ash tree genomics in response to ash dieback

    The ash tree genome project published in Nature today began, for me, with a lunchtime conversation with Andrew Leitch in the SCR bar at Queen Mary University of London in early November 2012. Ash dieback had been found in natural woodland in England for in late October. Such was the seriousness of the likely environmental […]