About Me

Andrew is a evolutionary ecologist whose work includes understanding the genetic basis and genomic consequences of life-history transitions such as plant mating system shifts and the evolution of oral microbiomes across archaeological time. He is broadly interested in using computational methods to answer fundamental questions in evolutionary biology.

Andrew received his PhD from University of Glasgow in 2011 where he worked in the lab of Prof. Barbara Mable. As a post-doctoral fellow with Prof. Kentaro Shimizu in Zurich, he worked on mating system evolution in various non-model plant systems, as well as identifying signatures of adaptation to heterogenious evironments. In his second post-doctoral postion with Prof. Tanja Slotte in Stockholm, Andrew worked on the evolutionary transition from self-incompatibility to self-compatibility within the Brassicaceae. As an Assistant Professor at the University of Bradford (2017 - 2021), he started his own group working on ancient metagenomics. In 2021 he became Associate Professor in Computational Biology. Since 2019 Andrew has been programme leader for two taught post-graduate programmes, MSc Bioinformatics and MSc Medical Bioscience.

About Us - Computational Bio-archaeology Group

The Computational Bio-Arch group brings together research backgrounds in population genomics, evolutionary ecology and life-history evolution, with more classical archaeology in order to address research questions about ancient populations, microbiome diversity and evolution and even whether modern sequencing techniques are actually robust when used with ancient samples.

Ancient DNA offers a whole host of ‘delightful’ issues typically not encountered when working with modern DNA samples. When one attempts to apply modern metagenomic methods to aDNA samples, things get really ‘interesting’. We are working to try to disentangle these methodological issues with the hope of getting to grips with some of the fundamental questions related to oral microbiome evolution.