Rate My Professor Grant Dick

Professor Grant Dick is a Professor and Head of the School of Computing at the University of Otago. Born and raised in Ōtepoti (Dunedin), he earned a BSc (Hons) in Information Science from the University of Otago in 2000. He completed his PhD in evolutionary computation in 2007, supported by a Foundation for Research, Science and Technology Bright Future Doctoral Scholarship after some pauses and interruptions. Dick's academic career at the University of Otago commenced in 2005 as a research fellow. He was appointed lecturer in the Department of Information Science in May 2006 and has served as Head of the Department (now School of Computing) since 2022. He is a recipient of a teaching award and is a member of the 100-level teaching group with a background in Information Systems development, lecturing on core papers in Commerce and Information Science.

Dick's research interests encompass computational intelligence methods, particularly evolutionary computation; adaptive business intelligence; multimodal and multi-objective problem solving; theoretical population genetics; and evolving systems, focusing on the role of population structure in speciation. His contributions center on data science and artificial intelligence, applying evolutionary computation—processes inspired by neo-Darwinian evolution—to solve complex problems in finance, engineering, medicine, and other domains without requiring extensive domain knowledge. He delivered his Inaugural Professorial Lecture, 'Evolutionary Computation: Artificial Intelligence Through Survival of the Fittest?', in May 2025. Key publications include 'SRBench++: Principled benchmarking of symbolic regression with domain-expert interpretation' (IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 2025, co-authored with F. O. de Franca et al.); 'Comparing blood biochemistry and haematology normal ranges of Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) from different production systems' (Aquaculture, 2025, co-authored with C. A. Owen et al.); 'Revisiting bagging for stochastic algorithms' (Advances in Artificial Intelligence, 2024, co-authored with C. A. Owen and P. A. Whigham); and 'Implicitly controlling bloat in genetic programming' (IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 2010, co-authored with P. A. Whigham). He currently supervises PhD candidates Paul Williams and Caitlin Owen, and co-supervises Harry Peyhani, Aladdin Shamoug, and Adriaan Lotter.