The Genetics Society has awarded the 2026 Mendel Medal to Joe Felsenstein. Some of you may know Joe because he sometimes posts comments on Sandwalk in order to "clarify" some of my more egregious errors. But I bet you didn't know all of the things he has done over the past few decades. Here's the full press release: [Mendel Medal 2026 – Professor Joe Felsenstein].
Professor Joe Felsenstein was born in 1942, grew up in Philadelphia and studied as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, with James F. Crow as his undergraduate mentor. He got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago with Richard Lewontin, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh with Alan Robertson. Since 1968 he has been at the University of Washington in the Department of Genetics, and then in the Department of Genome Sciences and also in the Department of Biology. He has worked on the population genetics theory of the effects of recombination, of geographic differentiation, and of speciation. From the late 1970s on, his main focus was on methods for inferring phylogenies.
His accomplishments in that field include showing that with certain shapes of the true evolutionary tree, parsimony methods will be inconsistent, tending to infer the wrong phylogeny. He developed dynamic programming methods for fast evaluation of likelihoods for DNA sequence phylogenies. He adapted the bootstrap method of statistical inference to phylogenies, which enables assessment of the statistical support for different groups. He wrote the central paper introducing phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate whether multiple characters have evolved in a correlated way.
He has also made these and other methods widely available by organising the development and distribution of the PHYLIP package of programs for inferring phylogenies, starting in 1980 and still continuing. In 2004, he published “Inferring Phylogenies”, which reviews and explains the major methods of statistical phylogenetics. He assisted his colleagues Mary Kuhner and Jon Yamato, in applying the likelihood methods for DNA sequence phylogenies to trees of gene copies within populations (coalescent trees), to infer population parameters such as population size, mutation rate, migration rates and recombination rates. They developed the LAMARC program for coalescent inferences.
He has received a number of honors, including membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Weldon Prize and Medal for biometry, and the Darwin-Wallace medal from the Linnean Society. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, and the International Prize for Biology from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Since his retirement in 2017, he has been active in critiquing mathematical arguments by advocates of Intelligent Design and creationism.
They forgot to mention that Joe has also written about sex [What did Joe Felsenstein say about sex?].
I hope he won't mind if I tell you about something else that isn't in the press release ... he likes BeaverTails [BeaverTails].
8 comments :
That description of me and my work is very good -- because I wrote it except for a few changes of words. Yes, I liked "beavertails". At least you didn't mistakenly say I hated Tim Horton's.
Congrats, Joe!
Thanks! By the way "The Genetics Society" involved is the U.K. one.
Congratulations, Joe. But you're being too modest. You fail to mention that you introduced the whole idea of maximum likelihood methods to phylogenetics. I should add that I used PHYLIP in my very first publication and that as a graduate student, your bound thesis was stored in my office at UC alongside many others, and it was by far the shortest.
Congratulations! So well deserved.
@John: Anthony Edwards and Luca Cavalli-Sforza first tried to use ML to infer phylogenies, in 1964. Jerzy Neyman used it first for molecular sequencies in 1971. I helped make the algorithms faster and contributed to making ML more practical and better-known.
Congratulations! I got into phylogenetic analysis around 2007, and Inferring Phylogenies had a lot to do with that.
@Graham Jones: I hope the book was helpful. Right now its price is more than double what it was then, so I am hesitant to recommend buying a new copy and also suggest looking for library copies.
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