Peter Donnelly

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Peter James Donnelly, born 15 May 1959, is an Australian-British mathematician. He is a Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Oxford and the CEO of Genomics PLC. He works in applied probability and coalescent theory, and his Oxford group develops methods to study genetic data.

Donnelly grew up in Brisbane, Queensland. His father, Austin Donnelly, was a financial adviser, economist and author, and his mother is Sheila Donnelly. He has a sister named Sharon and another sister, Melda. He studied at St Joseph's Christian Brothers College, Gregory Terrace, the University of Queensland, and Balliol College, Oxford.

In 1988, at age 29, he became a professor at Queen Mary College in London. He then held a chair at the University of Chicago from 1994 to 1996 and led the Statistics Department at Oxford from 1996 to 2001. From 2007 to 2018 he was Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford. He is a fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

Donnelly has helped train many leading researchers, including David Balding, Matthew Stephens and Jonathan Pritchard.

He is known for his work on interpreting DNA evidence and has acted as an expert witness in criminal trials. He collaborates closely with biologists and has worked on large projects such as the International HapMap Project and the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, a genome-wide association study.

In 2015 he became Chairman of the Royal Society's Machine Learning Working Group. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2008. He was knighted in 2019 for services to the understanding of human genetics in disease.