Mathematical Biology

The remarkable progress being made in the biological sciences on many fronts is opening up lots of new opportunities for joint research involving mathematicians. A mathematical biologist with good applied and statistical modelling skills will find themselves interacting with a great variety of people analysing and synthesising data, developing theories, and constructing useful predictive models. The information these models provide are essential information for the management of those systems - whether that be in the field of medicine, molecular biology or the environment.

At the University of Queensland we are actively involved in several ways: in computational biosciences, in biostatistics, in mathematical ecology, and in physiological modelling.

For more information follow the links to people's personal web pages.


Tony Bracken

Physiological modelling of drug delivery; intra- and inter-cellular transport; pattern formation by competitive exclusion of cell types; evolution of urban populations.
PhD Projects

Kevin Burrage

Bioinformatics, application of computational modelling, simulation and visualisation of complex systems; genetic regulatory process in cellular dynamics.

Annette Dobson

Biostatistics, application of statistical concepts and methods to health and medicine. Statistical epidemiology. Analysis of data from longitudinal studies of health and clinical trials.

Geoff Goodhill

Computational neuroscience, neural development, chemotaxis, synaptic plasticity, maps in visual cortex.

Jim Hanan

Simulation and visualisation techniques for biological research
Phd projects
Scholarship available

Thomas Huber

Computational biology, protein simulations and calculations, genomic evolution.

Geoff McLachlan

Biostatistics, machine learning, development of discriminant and cluster analysis techniques for the classification of tissue samples, microarrays.

Martin O'Hely

Stochastic modelling and simulation, mathematical population genetics, statistical genetics.

Phil Pollett

Markov Chains, Probability Theory, Stochastic Modelling in Ecology, Parasitology , Telecommunications, Epidemiology and Chemical Kinetics.

Hugh Possingham

Population modelling, pest management, harvesting, ecological modelling.

Current Students