Professor Geoff Nicholls

Associate Professor of Statistics

Biographical Sketch

Professor Geoff Nicholls, B.Sc. (Physics, Canterbury, New Zealand), MA, PhD (HEP, Cambridge, UK), teaches probability, statistics and applied mathematics. Geoff Nicholls joined the Statistics Department in 2005 from the Mathematics Department of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Geoff took his BSc at the Physics Department of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and his PhD at Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied particle physics in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

Research Interests

  • Bayesian inference
  • Statistical methods
  • Computational statistics
  • Monte Carlo, statistical senetics
  • Applied statistics

Geoff is working on Monte-Carlo based Bayesian statistical inference for problems with computationally demanding prior and likelihood evaluations. Practical computational methods for making Bayesian model comparison for complex stochastic systems are needed. Research is driven by problems from a range of application areas, including Geoscience, Linguistics, Genetics and Archaeology.

 

Publications

Chance, S., James, A., Peet, R. and Nicholls, G. (2011) “Classifying patients and controls using multi-dimensional scaling and exploring the metric of semantic space”, in Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2011, pp. 1817–1822.
Nicholls, G. and Nunn, P. (2010) On building and fitting a spatio-temporal change-point model for settlement and growth at Bourewa, Fiji Islands.

Contact Details

College affiliation: Fellow and Tutor at St Peter's College

Office: 1.12 

Graduate Students