Professor Andrew Francis
Head of School
PhD, University of New South Wales, 1999
BSc (Hons I), University of Sydney, 1994.
Science
School of Mathematics & Statistics
I joined UNSW in May 2024 as a Professor of Mathematics, and Head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics.
My academic career began with study in Pure Mathematics at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, followed by a postdoctoral position at the University of Virginia.  I worked at Western Sydney University from 2000 to early 2024, during which time I moved from Lecturer to Professor, and had a number of interesting opportunities. I held an ARC Future Fellowship from 2011 to 2014, to develop algebraic models of bacterial genome evolution; led a research centre in mathematics and data science; and spent the covid years (2020-23) as the Deputy Dean of my School. I have had further significant involvement with the Australian Research Council, for instance serving on ERA panels in 2015 and 2018, and on the College of Experts 2018-2021. I continue to serve roles for the ARC, and for the Australian Mathematical Society.
E-mail
Location
School of Mathematics and Statistics
UNSW Sydney
Anita B. Lawrence Centre Room 3075
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I am a mathematician who uses ways of thinking from discrete mathematics, such as group theory, graph theory, and combinatorics, to study problems from evolutionary biology. In my case many of these problems arise from phylogenetics, in which we try to represent the evolutionary history of a set of organisms (species, or more broadly sequence data from individual isolates, or even linguistic information) in a phylogenetic tree or network. But they also can be found in epidemiology, and in many other areas of biology (and of course, beyond). I trained in pure mathematics, so perhaps can be currently described as an applied pure mathematician.