Joshua Stevenson

I am a part-time Senior Analyst and PhD Candidate in Mathematics, with a goal of applying the skills I have learned through study and research in industry. I pride myself on my ability to notice problems that need solving and produce high-quality solutions.

Employment

2022 – Present

Senior Analytics and Insights Officer

Data, Systems and Insights, Department for Education Children and Young People

I have worked across several areas of the unit, including Youth Justice, Child Protection and Family Violence. My usual duties include:

  • Reviewing drafts of other state-wide or national reports to ensure data is accurately represented.
  • Summarising upcoming releases and producing briefings for ministers.
  • Extracting data from our data warehouse via SQL queries.
  • Designing and developing user friendly dashboards in Microsoft PowerBI.
  • Developing stored procedures to extract data for populating dashboards.
  • Analysing and formatting data to respond to data requests.
  • Developing indicators to transform data into interpretable information.
  • Participating in a number of national working groups.

2020 – 2021

Tutor/Teaching Assistant

University of Tasmania

I taught mathematics classes at UTAS, including discrete mathematics, linear algebra and first-year calculus. Duties included planning and delivering lessons and marking assignments.

2019

Research Assistant

University of Tasmania

I worked in the mathematical biology/phylogenetics group as a casual researcher at UTAS, writing code to perform simulations.

Education

2020 – Present

Doctor of Philosophy (Mathematics) at UTAS

My PhD project aims to develop efficient algebraic methods for computing evolutionary distance between circular genomes.

I have published papers during my degree and have presented my work at several conferences, including AustMS, ANZIAM and Phylomania, as well as the Student Symposium in Combinatorics where I gave a plenary talk as an invited speaker.

2019

First Class Honours in Mathematics at UTAS

My thesis investigated matrix rank based approaches to inferring phylogenetic trees from DNA sequence data.

2015 – 2018

Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of ICT (BSc-BICT) at UTAS

I completed a combined degree, allowing me to obtain both qualifications, including 3 majors within 4 years.

  • Majors in pure mathematics, software development and IT professionalism.
  • Minor in statistics and operations research.
  • Place on the Dean’s Honour Roll, with a 6.84 GPA.

Publications

2023

Evaluation of the Relative Performance of the Subflattenings Method for Phylogenetic Inference

Joshua Stevenson, Barbara Holland, Michael Charleston, Jeremy Sumner

  • Bulletin of Mathematical Biology
  • 10.1007/s11538-023-01120-z

I wrote a software package in Python to perform simulations in order to evaluate the performance of a new method for reconstructing phylogenetic trees. The paper also includes analyses of genetic sequence data.

2023

Rearrangement Events on Circular Genomes

Joshua Stevenson, Venta Terauds, Jeremy Sumner

  • Bulletin of Mathematical Biology
  • 10.1007/s11538-023-01209-5

This paper discusses combinatorial aspects of circular genomes and genome rearrangement events under an algebraic framework.

2021

A symmetry-inclusive algebraic approach to genome rearrangement

Venta Terauds, Joshua Stevenson, Jeremy Sumner

  • Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
  • 10.1142/S0219720021400151

Projects

2020 – Present

Circular Genome Tools (SageMath/Python package)

A Python package for estimating evolutionary distances between circular genomes.

  • Python/Sage
  • GAP
  • GH Actions
  • PyPI
  • PyTest
  • Sphinx
2019 – Present

SplitP (Python package)

A Python package that implements matrix rank based approaches for inferring evolutionary trees from DNA sequence data.

  • Python
  • SciPy
  • GH Actions
  • PyPI
  • PyTest
  • Sphinx
2017/18

Evaluating Subflattenings (Summer Research Project)

I received a scholarship to complete a summer project on evaluating performance of a new method for reconstructing phylogenetic trees. I continued this work as a research assistant and later as an honours student.

  • Python
  • SciPy
2016/17

Hospital Bed Queue Modelling (Summer Research Project)

I received a scholarship to complete a summer project on modelling real hospital bed queue data as a Markov birth-death process.

  • Python
  • R
  • MATLAB
  • Pandas
  • SciPy

Achievements, Awards & Qualifications

2021

Outstanding Performance during Postgraduate Studies

2019

Alexander McAulay Scholarship in Mathematics

2016 & 2017

Dean’s Summer Research Scholarship Recipient

2015

George Alexander Foundation Scholarship

2014

Shortlisted in the CPA Plan Your Own Enterprise competition

Technical Skills

Computer Languages

  • Python
  • SQL
  • HTML/CSS
  • JavaScript
  • Swift
  • R
  • C/C++
  • Java
  • C#
  • LaTeX
  • SageMath
  • GAP

Tools, Environments, Frameworks

  • Power BI
  • Power Automate
  • Sketch
  • XCode
  • Adobe XD
  • GitHub
  • NodeJS and NPM
  • Visual Studio
  • Firebase
  • SQL and No-SQL databases

Other technical skills

  • Version control
  • Continuous integration
  • Database design
  • Test-driven development
  • Stochastic models
  • Statistical data analysis