Ziheng Yang
This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.
Ziheng Yang is the R.A. Fisher Professor of Statistical Genetics at University College London. Yang’s research interests include molecular evolution, population genetics, computational biology, and computational statistics. He develops statistical methods and computer software for comparative analysis of genetic sequence data. He has published around 200 scientific papers and two books.
During his Radcliffe fellowship, Yang is developing new computational algorithms in his Bayesian program, BPP, and implementing a parallel version to improve its computational efficiency. The improvements will make BPP suitable for analyzing large genome-scale data sets that are rapidly accumulating.
Yang received a PhD in agronomy in 1992 from Beijing University of Agriculture. He then held a few postdoctoral researcher positions in the United Kingdom, at the Natural History Museum, London, and the University of Cambridge, and in the United States, at Pennsylvania State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He joined UCL in 1997, initially as a lecturer, then reader, and professor. He maintains a software package called PAML. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2006, Yang was awarded the 2008 Presidents’ Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society of Systematic Biologists and the 2010 Frink Medal from the Zoological Society of London.
