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Staff Profile

Dr Jere Koskela

Director of Statistics and Data Science, Reader in Statistics and Data Science

  • Email: jere.koskela@ncl.ac.uk
  • Address: School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics
    Herschel Building
    Newcastle University
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
Background

I joined the school as Reader in Statistics in August 2023. Here is a quick biography of where I was before that:

  • Associate professor, Department of Statistics, University of Warwick, 2021-23
  • Assistant professor, Department of Statistics, University of Warwick, 2017-21
  • Postdoctoral researcher, Mathematics Institute, TU Berlin, 2016-17

I obtained my PhD from the Mathematics and Statistics Doctoral Training Centre (MASDOC) at the University of Warwick in 2016.

I'm a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and vice chair of their applied probability section committee, and an honorary fellow of the Warwick Department of Statistics.

Research

My research interests encompass branching-coalescing particle systems and diffusion processes, particularly (but not exclusively) as models of population genetics. I'm also interested in Bayesian nonparametric inference, as well as the theory and practice of Monte Carlo methods and computational statistics.

I'm a member of the tskit developer group, and in particular, have worked on the msprime package for simulating genome-scale data. I'm also an associate researcher on the MathRad programme on mathematical modelling of radiation transport.

I'm supervising Sizhe Zhou's PhD at the University of Warwick. I'm also an informal co-supervisor of Marta Dai Pra at HU Berlin, and Usman Ladan at Warwick.

My former PhD students include:

Grants with which I've been involved are:

  • EPSRC research grant EP/V049208/1, Mathematical foundations of non-reversible MCMC for genome-scale inference (£80k), 2021-22 (as PI).
  • EPSRC New Investigator Award EP/R044732/1, Exact scalable inference for coalescent processes (£100k), 2018-20 (as PI).
  • DFG SPP1819 start-up grant, Population genomics of highly fecund codfish (16k€). As Co-PI, joint with Bjarki Eldon (PI) and Maite Wilke Berenguer (Co-PI).
  • Icelandic Centre for Research Grant of Excellence 185151-051, Population genomics of highly fecund codfish. As collaborator, PIs: Einar Arnason (corresponding PI, University of Iceland), Katrin Halldorsdottir (University of Iceland), Alison Etheridge (University of Oxford), Wolfgang Stephan (Berlin Natural History Museum), Bjarki Eldon (Berlin Natural History Museum).

In 2022 I was awarded the Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award.

Teaching

In the 2025/26 academic year I'll be teaching MAS3925/MAS8615 Statistical Genetics (with Advanced Topics).

Publications