Rate My Professor Peter Stockwell

Dr. Peter Stockwell serves as Scientific Officer in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, Dunedin School of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Otago. He obtained his BSc (Hons) in 1973 and PhD in 1982 from the University of Otago's Department of Biochemistry. His PhD research centered on DNA sequencing and data analysis, positioning him as the department's pioneer in computational analysis of sequencing data. Stockwell's career at Otago began in 1968 as an undergraduate, advancing through positions as Research Fellow, Assistant Lecturer, and Post-Doctoral Fellow at Cancer Research UK. Returning to Otago, he managed computing infrastructure including PDP-11 and VAX2 systems, and developed databases and software tools that continue to be updated and publicly available. In 2014, he was honored with the Otago School of Medical Sciences Distinguished Research Support Staff Award and the School of Biomedical Sciences Distinguished Contribution to Research award. After 48 years in Biochemistry, he retired at the end of 2017 but maintains a part-time role in Pathology to support ongoing collaborations with researchers such as Michael Eccles and Aniruddha Chatterjee.

Stockwell's research interests encompass bioinformatics and computational biology, with expertise in epigenetics, DNA methylation analysis from bisulfite sequencing, epigenomics, transcriptome analysis, next-generation sequencing data management, and computer parsing of sequence database annotations. He has contributed to 126 publications, accumulating 5,787 citations. Notable works include 'DMAP: differential methylation analysis package for RRBS and WGBS data' (Bioinformatics, 2014), 'Pre-treatment DNA methylome and transcriptome profiles correlate with melanoma response to anti-PD1 immunotherapy' (Cancer Letters, 2025), 'DMAP2: A Pipeline for Analysis of Whole-Genome-Scale DNA Methylation Sequencing Data' (Current Protocols, 2024), 'Comparing DNA methylation landscapes in peripheral blood from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Long COVID patients' (International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2025), 'Epigenetic deregulation of transposable elements links developmental processes and tumorigenesis' (International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2026), and 'Three transposable elements exhibiting differential expression in pre-eclampsia overlap with enhancer regions' (Placenta, 2024). His software developments, including DMAP, DMAP2, RepExpress, HOMED, and SSEdit, facilitate epigenetics research and have been widely applied in projects on cancer, pre-eclampsia, and other conditions.