Professor Andrew Francis
PhD, University of New South Wales, 1999
BSc (Hons I), University of Sydney, 1994.
I joined UNSW in May 2024 as a Professor of Mathematics, and Head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics.
My academic career began with study in Pure Mathematics at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, followed by a postdoctoral position at the University of Virginia. I worked at Western Sydney University from 2000 to early 2024, during which time I moved from Lecturer to Professor, and had a number of interesting opportunities. I held an ARC Future Fellow...
- Publications
- Research Activities
I am a mathematician who uses ways of thinking from discrete mathematics, such as group theory, graph theory, and combinatorics, to study problems from evolutionary biology. In my case many of these problems arise from phylogenetics, in which we try to represent the evolutionary history of a set of organisms (species, or more broadly sequence data from individual isolates, or even linguistic information) in a phylogenetic tree or network. But they also can be found in epidemiology, and in many other areas of biology (and of course, beyond). I trained in pure mathematics, so perhaps can be currently described as an applied pure mathematician.