Rate My Professor John Pearson

Associate Professor John Pearson serves as Research Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology and Biomedical Science at the University of Otago, Christchurch, and is the Director of the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Unit. He holds an MSc and PhD from the University of Auckland. Pearson's career trajectory demonstrates extensive expertise in statistics and bioinformatics. He began as a Lecturer in statistics at the University of Auckland from 1998 to 2001. From 2001 to 2006, he worked at Vialactia Biosciences (NZ) Ltd first as a bioinformatics statistician and then as senior statistician, contributing to animal studies, microarray analysis and design, experimental design, and genetics. Between 2006 and 2008, he was a statistical analyst and senior research statistician at Statistics New Zealand, where he focused on economic surveys and strategic development. Since 2008, he has been a biostatistical consultant at the University of Otago, Christchurch, advancing to his current academic position.

Pearson's academic interests center on microarrays, genetics, bioinformatics, statistical computing, and survey methods. He is a member of the New Zealand Statistics Association and offers consulting biostatistics services to researchers across the University of Otago. His scholarly contributions have amassed over 13,640 citations according to Google Scholar, underscoring his impact in statistics, genetics, genomics, neuroscience, and epidemiology. He collaborates on major international projects, including those with the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. Key publications include 'Mapping the genetic landscape across 14 psychiatric disorders' in Nature (2026), 'Multi-ancestral genome-wide association study of clinically defined nicotine dependence reveals strong genetic correlations with other substance use disorders and health-related traits' in Psychological Medicine (2025), 'Genome-wide association meta-analysis of childhood ADHD symptoms and diagnosis identifies new loci and potential effector genes' in Nature Genetics (2025), 'Colorectal polyp distribution in relation to age: Meta-analysis' in BJS Open (2025), and 'Improved human skin vitamin C levels and skin function following dietary intake of kiwifruit: A high vitamin C food' in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology (2025).