Rate My Professor David Bryant

David Bryant is Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Otago, where he currently serves as Head of the Department of Mathematics, Postgraduate Adviser for Mathematics, and Director of Computational Modelling (COMO). He is also Vice-President of the New Zealand Mathematical Society. Bryant earned his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Canterbury between 1994 and 1997, supervised by Mike Steel. His academic career includes appointments as Associate Professor of Mathematical Biology and Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Biology at the University of Auckland from 2005 to 2010, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University in 2005, Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University from 2001 to 2005, postdoctoral researcher at LIRMM in Montpellier with Olivier Gascuel from 2000 to 2001, and postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques in Montreal with David Sankoff from 1998 to 2000.

Bryant's research specializes in the mathematical, statistical, and computational dimensions of evolutionary biology, with particular emphasis on phylogenetics for reconstructing evolutionary histories, population genetics, metric geometry and mathematical diversities, and computational Bayesian statistics. He is a world leader in devising mathematical tools to infer evolutionary relationships among biological organisms, with applications spanning early bacterial evolution, plant ecology, pathogen identification, and cultural evolution such as the origins of fairy tales. His contributions are highly influential, evidenced by over 70 publications and software tools like NeighborNet. Key works include 'NeighborNet: An agglomerative algorithm for the construction of phylogenetic networks' with V. Moulton (2004), 'Inferring species trees directly from biallelic genetic markers: Bypassing gene trees in a full coalescent analysis' with R. Bouckaert et al. (2012), 'Application of phylogenetic networks in evolutionary studies' (2006, over 10,000 citations), and 'Bayesian inference of species trees using diffusion models' with M. Stoltz et al. (2021). Bryant holds Fellow status in the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ), is the joint winner of the 2016 New Zealand Mathematical Society Research Award, and served as President of the New Zealand Mathematical Society from 2020 to 2022.