Professor Stephen Leslie
Stephen Leslie is Professor of Statistical Genomics at the University of Melbourne. Stephen completed his doctorate in statistics at the University of Oxford in 2008. After graduating, Stephen was a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Statistics at Oxford and was then awarded one of Oxford’s prestigious Nuffield Department of Medicine Scientific Leadership Fellowships. In 2012 Stephen returned to Australia to establish his own research group. Since 2016 Stephen has been at the University of Melbourne, in the Schools of Mathematics and Statistics, and Biosciences, and Melbourne Integrative Genomics. In 2016 Stephen was awarded the Woodward Medal by the University of Melbourne, the University’s highest award for research by faculty. In 2019 Stephen was awarded the Moran Medal of the Australian Academy of Science.
Stephen’s work covers several aspects of statistical and population genetics. His main interests are in detecting, understanding and controlling for population differences in genetic data (including the landmark People of the British Isles study); typing complex genetic variation, with a particular focus on immune-associated loci (developed the first methods for typing variation in HLA and KIR from SNP genotype data; HLA typed the entire UK Biobank as part of the main data release); developing new statistical and computational approaches for analysing genomic data; and performing statistically rigorous analyses of the relationship of genetic variants to disease (many disease association studies with a particular focus on HLA and autoimmune disease).
