Robert Lanfear

Robert Lanfear is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University (ANU), affiliated with the Division of Ecology and Evolution. He holds a PhD from the University of Sussex (2008) and has held postdoctoral positions at ANU and Macquarie University. His research focuses on molecular evolution, phylogenetics, and bioinformatics, with a particular emphasis on somatic mutations in plants and the development of phylogenetic software tools like PartitionFinder and IQ-TREE.

Education: BSc and Honors in Ecology, MSc in Artificial Intelligence, PhD in Developmental Biology (University of Sussex). His work integrates comparative methods, genomics, and computational approaches to understand mutation dynamics, evolutionary processes, and the development of robust analytical tools for evolutionary studies.

Research interests include plant somatic mutation accumulation, genomic evolution in plants, and statistical methods for phylogenetic analysis. He leads projects on scalable phylogenetic methods for large genomic datasets and collaborates on real-time genomic epidemiology. His software contributions include IQ-TREE, DecentTree, and RWTY, which are widely used for phylogenetic inference and analysis.

Supervision: Actively recruiting students for research on plant somatic mutations and molecular evolution. Projects span fieldwork, genomic sequencing, and computational modeling.

Labs/Teams: Associated with ANU’s Ecology and Evolution research groups, focusing on bioinformatics and genomics. Collaborations include software development for evolutionary analysis and pandemic genomic studies.