Rate My Professor David Evans

Professor David Evans is an NHMRC Leadership Fellow and Professor of Statistical Genetics at the University of Queensland Institute for Molecular Bioscience, where he also directs the Centre for Population and Disease Genomics. He completed a Bachelor with Honours and a Doctor of Philosophy in Statistical Genetics at the University of Queensland in 2003. After his PhD, Evans undertook a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, where he contributed to the International HapMap Consortium and co-led analyses of four diseases in the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. In 2007, he became a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, leading genome-wide association studies in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. He was appointed Chair at the University of Queensland in 2013 while continuing to lead an MRC Programme in statistical genetics at Bristol. Evans serves as Academic Codirector of the NIH-funded International Workshop on Statistical Genetics Methods and as faculty on the European Programme in Educational Epidemiology.

Evans specializes in genetic epidemiology, mapping the genetic basis of complex traits and diseases such as birthweight, osteoporosis, ankylosing spondylitis, sepsis, and laterality using genome-wide association studies. He develops statistical methodologies for gene mapping, risk prediction, causal modelling, Mendelian randomization, and structural equation modelling, with applications to the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease hypothesis. His team has conducted landmark studies, including the largest genome-wide association study of handedness in over 1.7 million individuals (Cuellar-Partida et al., Nature Human Behaviour, 2020) and large-scale osteoporosis analyses. Evans received the NHMRC Marshall and Warren Award and holds an NHMRC Leadership Fellowship. Highly cited works include 'Genome-wide association study of 14,000 cases of seven common diseases and 3,000 shared controls' (Nature, 2007), 'The MR-Base platform supports systematic causal inference across the human phenome' (eLife, 2018), and 'Genome-wide meta-analysis identifies 56 bone mineral density loci' (Nature Genetics, 2012). He has developed software like LDHub for genetic correlation estimation from GWAS summary statistics.