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11 Facts About Ziheng Yang

1.

Ziheng Yang was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006.

2.

Ziheng Yang was a Lecturer, Reader, and then Professor in the same department.

3.

Ziheng Yang was a Visiting Associate Professor at Institute of Statistical Mathematics, a visiting professor at University of Tokyo, Institute of Zoology in Beijing, Peking University, National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan, and Swiss Institute of Technology, Zurich.

4.

Ziheng Yang developed a number of statistical models and methods in the 1990s, which have been implemented in maximum likelihood and Bayesian software programs for phylogenetic analysis of DNA and protein sequence data.

5.

Together with Nick Goldman, Ziheng Yang developed the codon model of nucleotide substitution in 1994.

6.

Ziheng Yang developed the statistical method for reconstructing ancestral sequences in 1995.

7.

Together with Bruce Rannala, Ziheng Yang introduced Bayesian statistics into molecular phylogenetics in 1996.

8.

Ziheng Yang maintains the program package PAML and the Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo program BPP.

9.

Ziheng Yang studied the star tree paradox, which is that Bayesian model selection produces spuriously high posterior probabilities for the binary trees if the data are simulated under the star tree.

10.

Ziheng Yang has worked extensively on Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms, deriving many Metropolis-Hastings algorithms in Bayesian phylogenetics.

11.

Ziheng Yang organized and taught in a number of workshops in Beijing, China.