Staff Profile

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 sit on their applied probability section committee, and an honorary fellow of the Warwick Department of Statistics.

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 three PhD students based at Warwick: Alicia Gill, Ian Roberts, and Sizhe Zhou. I'm also an informal co-supervisor of Marta Dai Pra at HU Berlin, and Usman Ladan at Warwick.

My previous PhD students include:

• Suzie Brown (University of Warwick),
• Jaromir Sant (University of Warwick),
• Phil Hanson (University of Warwick, informal involvement).

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.

In the 2023/24 academic year I'll be teaching MAS8955 Advanced Topics in Statistics B, and act as a group project supervisor for MAS3091.

• Articles

  • Koskela J, Łatuszyński K, Spanò D. Bernoulli factories and duality in Wright–Fisher and Allen–Cahn models of population genetics. Theoretical Population Biology 2024, 156, 40-45.
  • Wong Y, Ignatieva A, Koskela J, Gorjanc G, Wohns AW, Kelleher J. A general and efficient representation of ancestral recombination graphs. Genetics 2024, 228(1).
  • Brown S, Jenkins PA, Johansen AM, Koskela J. Weak convergence of non-neutral genealogies to Kingman's coalescent. Stochastic Processes and their Applications 2023, 162, 76-105.
  • Árnason E, Koskela J, Halldórsdóttir K, Eldon B. Sweepstakes reproduction via pervasive and recurrent selective sweeps. eLife 2023, 12, e80781.
  • Sant J, Jenkins PA, Koskela J, Spanò D. EWF: Simulating exact paths of the Wright-Fisher diffusion. Bioinformatics 2023, 39(1), btad017.
  • Koskela J. Zig-zag sampling for discrete structures and non-reversible phylogenetic MCMC. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 2022, 31(3), 684-694.
  • Baumdicker F, Bisschop G, Goldstein D, Gower G, Ragsdale AP, Tsambos G, Zhu S, Eldon B, Ellerman EC, Galloway JG, Gladstein AL, Gorjanc G, Guo B, Jeffery B, Kretzschumar WW, Lohse K, Matschiner M, Nelson D, Pope NS, Quinto-Cortés CD, Rodrigues MF, Saunack K, Sellinger T, Thornton K, van Kemenade H, Wohns AW, Wong Y, Gravel S, Kern AD, Koskela J, Ralph PL, Kelleher J. Efficient ancestry and mutation simulation with msprime 1.0. Genetics 2022, 220(3), iyab229.
  • Sant J, Jenkins PA, Koskela J, Spanò D. Convergence of likelihood ratios and estimators for selection in non-neutral Wright-Fisher diffusions. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics 2022, 49(4), 1728-1760.
  • Mahmoudi A, Koskela J, Kelleher J, Chan Y, Balding D. Bayesian inference of ancestral recombination graphs. PLOS Computational Biology 2022, 18(3), e1009960.
  • Brown S, Jenkins PA, Johansen AM, Koskela J. Simple conditions for convergence of sequential Monte Carlo genealogies with applications. Electronic Journal of Probability 2021, 26, 1.
  • Blath J, Buzzoni E, Koskela J, Wilke Berenguer M. Statistical tools for seed bank detection. Theoretical Population Biology 2020, 132, 1-15.
  • Koskela J, Jenkins PA, Johansen AM, Spanò D. Asymptotic genealogies of interacting particle systems with an application to sequential Monte Carlo. Annals of Statistics 2020, 48(1), 560-583.
  • Koskela J, Wilke Berenguer M. Robust model selection between population growth and multiple merger coalescents. Mathematical Biosciences 2019, 311, 1-12.
  • Koskela J, Spanò D, Jenkins PA. Consistency of Bayesian nonparametric inference for discretely observed jump diffusions. Bernoulli 2019, 25(3), 2183-2205.
  • Koskela J. Multi-locus data distinguishes between population growth and multiple merger coalescents. Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology 2018, 17(3), 20170011.
  • Koskela J, Spanò D, Jenkins PA. Inference and rare event simulation for stopped Markov processes via reverse-time sequential Monte Carlo. Statistics and Computing 2018, 28(1), 131-144.
  • Koskela J, Jenkins PA, Spanò D. Bayesian nonparametric inference for Λ-coalescents: posterior consistency and a parametric method. Bernoulli 2018, 24(3), 2122-2153.
  • Koskela J, Jenkins PA, Spanò D. Computational inference beyond Kingman's coalescent. Journal of Applied Probability 2015, 52(2), 519-537.