Michael Anthony Steel (born May 1960) is a New Zealand mathematician and statistician, a Distinguished Professor of mathematics and statistics ^[1] and the Director of the Biomathematics Research Centre at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.^[2] He is known for his research on modeling and reconstructing evolutionary trees.

Biography

Steel studied at the University of Canterbury, earning a bachelor's degree in 1982, a masters in 1983, and a degree in journalism in 1985. He then moved to Massey University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1989, supervised by Michael D. Hendy and David Penny.^[3] He joined the Canterbury faculty in 1994.^[2]

Awards and honours

Steel won the Hamilton Memorial Prize of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1994; this prize is given annually to a New Zealand mathematician for work done within five years of a Ph.D.^[4]

In 1999 he won the research award of the New Zealand Mathematical Society "for his fundamental contributions to the mathematical understanding of phylogeny, demonstrating a capacity for hard creative work in combinatorics and statistics and an excellent understanding of the biological implications of his results."^[5]

He became a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2003.^[6]

In 2018, Steel was elected as a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, for his outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.^[7]

Selected publications

• Lockhart, Peter J., Michael A. Steel, Michael D. Hendy, and David Penny. "Recovering evolutionary trees under a more realistic model of sequence evolution." Molecular biology and evolution 11, no. 4 (1994): 605–612.
• Esser, Christian, Nahal Ahmadinejad, Christian Wiegand, Carmen Rotte, Federico Sebastiani, Gabriel Gelius-Dietrich, Katrin Henze et al. "A genome phylogeny for mitochondria among α-proteobacteria and a predominantly eubacterial ancestry of yeast nuclear genes." Molecular Biology and Evolution 21, no. 9 (2004): 1643–1660.
• Erdős, Péter L., Michael A. Steel, László A. Székely, and Tandy J. Warnow. "A few logs suffice to build (almost) all trees (I)." Random Structures & Algorithms 14, no. 2 (1999): 153–184.
• Erdös, Péter L., Michael A. Steel, LászlóA Székely, and Tandy J. Warnow. "A few logs suffice to build (almost) all trees: part II." Theoretical Computer Science 221, no. 1-2 (1999): 77–118.