Date of birth: 11.2.65
1981-1983 : Richmond Tertiary College, Egerton Rd., Twickenham, Middx. UK.
1983-1986 : University of Manchester, Oxford Rd. Manchester UK. BSc : Physics (II.I)
1986-1989 : University of Strathclyde, Rottenrow, Glasgow. PhD (Department of Physics and Applied Physics). Thesis : "Estimation of mortality rates in stage structured zooplankton populations"
2001 : Royal Statistical Society Graduate Diploma in Statistics (with Distinction).
Post-doc at NERC Centre for Population Biology, Imperial college at Silwood Park. (July 1990 until July 1994)
Lecturer in Statistics, University of St. Andrews, Sept. 1994- Sept. 1999
Reader in Statistics, University of St. Andrews, Sept. 1999 - Dec. 2002
Senior Lecturer, then Reader in Statistics, University of Glasgow, from Jan. 2003 until Sept. 2005.
Professor of Statistics, University of Bath, since Jan. 2006
Wood S.N & R.M. Nisbet (1991) "Estimation of Mortality rates in stage structured populations" Springer-Verlag Berlin
Wood S.N. (1993) "How to estimate life history stage durations from stage structured population data" J. theor. Biol. 163:61-76
Prendergast, J.R., S.N. Wood , J.H. Lawton & B.C. Eversham (1993) "Correcting for variation in recording effort in analysis of diversity hotspots" Biodiversity Letters 1:39-53.
Wood S.N. (1994) " Obtaining birth and death rate patterns from structured population trajectories" Ecological Monographs 64(1):23-44.
Wood S.N. (1994) "Monotonic smoothing splines fitted by cross-validation" SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing 15(5): 1126-1133
Wood S.N. (1994) "Spline models of biological population dynamics: how to estimate mortality rates for stage structured populations with dimorphic life histories" IMA J. Math. Appl. Med. Biol. 11:61-78
Quinn, R.M., J.H. Lawton, B.C. Eversham & S.N. Wood (1994) "The Biogeography of scarce vascular plants in Britain with respect to habitat preference, dispersal ability and reproductive biology" Biological Conservation 70:149-157.
Shea K., M.Rees & S.N.Wood (1994) "Trade-offs, Elasticity and the comparative method" Journal of Ecology 82:951-957.
Davis, A.J., L.S. Jenkinson, J.H. Lawton, B. Shorrocks & S.N. Wood (1995) "Global-warming, population dynamics and community structure in a model insect assemblage" in Insects in a changing environment; 17th Royal Entomological Symposium 1993 (eds. N. Stork and R. Harrington)
Carruthers, R., M.B.Thomas, T.Larkin, C.J.Lomer & S.N.Wood (in press) Development and application of host pathogen models with application to the biological control of locusts and grasshoppers. In Microbial Control of Grasshoppers and Locusts (eds. M.S. Goettel and D.L. Johnson) Memoirs of the Entomological society of Canada.
Nisbet, R.M. & S.N.Wood (1996) "Estimation of copepod mortality rates" Ophelia 44:157-169
Ohman, M. & S.N. Wood (1995) "The inevitability of mortality" ICES Journal on Marine Science 52: 517-522
Ohman, M. & S.N. Wood (1996) "Mortality estimation for planktonic copepods" Limnology and Oceanography 41(1):126-135
Wood S.N & J.W. Horwood (1995) "Spatial distribution functions and abundances inferred from sparse noisy plankton data: an application of constrained thin plate splines." Journal of Plankton Research 17(6):1189-1208
Wood, S.N. "Inverse problems and structured population dynamics" (1997) in Structured Population Models in Marine, Terrestrial and Freshwater Systems edited by Shripad Tuljapurkar and Hal Caswell. Chapman & Hall
Thomas, M.B., S.N. Wood & C.J. Lomer (1995) "Biocontrol of locusts and grasshoppers using a fungal pathogen: the importance of secondary cycling" Proceedings of the Royal Society (B) 259:265-270
Gaston K.J., R.M.Quinn, S.Wood & H.R.Arnold (1996) "Measures of geographic range size: the effects of sample size" Ecography 19:259-268
Jenkinson, L.S., A.J. Davis, S. Wood, B. Shorrocks and J.H.Lawton (1996) "Not that simple: global warming and predictions of insect ranges and abundances - results from a model insect assemblage in replicated laboratory ecosystems" Aspects of Applied Biology 45:343-348
Thomas, M.B., S.N. Wood, J. Langewald & C.J. Lomer (1997) "Persistence of Biopesticides and Consequences for Biological control of Grasshoppers and Locusts" Pesticide Science 49:47-55
Thomas, M.B., J. Langewald & S.N. Wood (1996) "Evaluating the effects of a biopesticide on populations of the variegated grasshopper, Zonocerus variegatus" Journal of Applied Ecology 33:1509-1516
Thomas, M.B. & S.N. Wood (1997) "Fungal ecology and its application to the practical use of mycoinsecticides" BCPC Symposium Proceedings No. 68:Microbial Insecticides: Novelty or Necessity?
Wood, S.N. (1998) Contributor to the Encyclopedia of Ecology and Environmental Management. Blackwell Science, Oxford.
Wood, S.N. & M.B. Thomas (1996) "Space, time and the persistence of virulent pathogens" Proceedings of the Royal Society (B) 263:673-680.
Asknes, D.L., C.B. Miller, M.D.Ohman & S.N.Wood (1997) "Estimation techniques used in studies of copepod population dynamics - A review of underlying assumptions" Sarsia 82(4):279-296
Ellner, Stephen P.; Kendall, Bruce E.; Wood, Simon N.; McCauley, Ed; Briggs, Cheryl J. (1997) Inferring Mechanism from Time-Series Data: Delay Differential Equations. Physica D 110(3-4):182-194
Thomas M.B., S.N. Wood & V. Solorzano (1999) "Application of Insect Pathogen models to biological control" in Theoretical Approaches to Biological Control (ed B.A Hawkins & H.V. Cornell) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Kendall, B.E., C.J. Briggs, W.W. Murdoch, P. Turchin, S.P. Ellner, E. McCauley, R.M. Nisbet & S.N. Wood (1999) "Inferring the Causes of Population Cycles: A Synthesis of Statistical and Mechanistic Modeling Approaches" Ecology 80(6):1789-1805
Wood, S.N. & M.B. Thomas (1999) "Super Sensitivity to structure in biological models" Proceedings of the Royal Society (B) 266:565-570
Wood, S.N. (1999) "Semi-parametric population models" Aspects of Applied Biology 53:41-50.
McCauley E., Kendall B.E., Janssen A., Wood S., Murdoch W.W., Hosseini P., Briggs C.J., Ellner S.P., Nisbet R.M., Sabelis M.W., Turchin P. (2000) "Inferring colonization processes from population dynamics in spatially structured predator-prey systems" Ecology 81(12):3350-336
Wood, S.N. (2000) "Modelling and smoothing parameter estimation with multiple quadratic penalties". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (B) 62(2):413-428.
Wood, S.N. (2001) "Partially specified Ecological Models" Ecological Monographs 71(1):1-25.
Wood, S.N. (2001) "Minimising model fitting objectives that contain spurious local minima by bootstrap restarting" Biometrics 57(1):240-244.
Wood, S.N. (2001) "mgcv: GAMs and Generalized Ridge Regression for R" R News 1(2):20-25
Ellner, S.P., E. McCauley, B.E. Kendall, C.J. Briggs, P.R. Hosseini, S.N. Wood, A. Janssen, M.W. Sabelis, P. Turchin, R.M. Nisbet and W.W. Murdoch (2001) "Habitat structure and population persistence in an experimental community". Nature 412:538-543
Gurney, W.S.C., D.C. Speirs, S.N. Wood, E.D. Clarke and M.R. Heath (2001) Simulating spatially and physiologically structured populations. Journal of Animal Ecology 70, 881-895
Wood, S.N. and N.H. Augustin (2002) GAMs with integrated model selection using penalized regression splines and applications to environmental modelling. Ecological Modelling 157:157-177
Eiane, K., D.L. Asknes, M.D. Ohman, S. Wood and M.B. Martinussen (2002) Stage-specific mortality of Calanus spp. under different predation regimes. Limnology and Oceanography. 47(3): 636-645
Turchin, P. S.N. Wood, S.P. Ellner, B.E. Kendall, W.W. Murdoch, A. Fischlin, J. Casas, E. McCauley and C.E. Briggs (2003) Dynamical Effects of Plant Quality and Parasitism on Population Cycles of Larch Budmoth. Ecology 84(5): 1207-1214
Wood, S.N. (2003) Thin-plate regression splines. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (B) 65(1):95-114
Wood, S.N. (2004) Stable and efficient multiple smoothing parameter estimation for generalized additive models. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 99:673-686
Speirs DC, Gurney WSC, Holmes SJ, Heath MR, Wood SN, Clarke ED, Harms IH, Hirche HJ and McKenzie E (2004) Understanding demography in an advective environment: modelling Calanus finmarchicus in the Norwegian Sea. Journal of Animal Ecology 73 (5): 897-910
Nisbet RM, McCauley E, Gurney WSC, Murdoch WW and Wood SN (2004) Formulating and testing a partially specified dynamic energy budget model. Ecology 85(11):3132-3139
Kendall BE, Ellner SP, McCauley E, Wood SN, Briggs CJ, Murdoch WM and Turchin P (2005) Population cycles in the pine looper moth: Dynamical tests of mechanistic hypotheses. Ecological Monographs 75(2):259-276
Speirs DC, Gurney WSC, Heath MR and Wood SN (2005) Modelling the basin-scale demography of Calanus finmarchicus in the north-east Atlantic. Fisheries and Oceanography 14(5):333-358
Demyanov V, Wood SN and Kedwards TJ (2006) Improving ecological impact assessment by statistical data synthesis using process-based models. Applied Statistics 55(1):41-62
Clarke ED, Speirs DC, Heath MR, Wood SN, Gurney WSC and Holmes SJ (2006) Calibrating remotely sensed chlorophyll-a data by using penalized regression splines. Applied Statistics 55(3): 331-353
Speirs DC, Gurney WSC, Heath MR, Horbelt W, Wood SN and de Cuevas BA (2006) Ocean-scale modelling of the distribution, abundance, and seasonal dynamics of the copepod Calanus finmarchicus. Marine Ecology-Progress Series 313: 173-192
Wood, S.N. (2006) Generalized Additive Models: An Introduction with R. CRC/Chapman & Hall.
Wood, S.N. (2006) On confidence intervals for generalized additive models based on penalized regression splines. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics. 48(4): 445-464.
Wood, S.N. (2006) Low-Rank Scale-Invariant Tensor Product Smooths for Generalized Additive Mixed Models. Biometrics. 62(4):1025-1036
I was responsible for a large part of the design and 80% of the writing of our first year statistics course at St Andrews. This course 65 lecture/lab course consists of 3 extended statistical case studies (climate change, financial modelling and fisheries) comprising about half of the course, with the other half of the course being a theory section.
I wrote the 10 session statistics component of the first year Scientific IT course at St Andrews: sessions consist of a mini-lecture followed by students working through notes in the computer lab.
I wrote a 24 lecture, 10 lab honours course on ecological modelling, which aims to show students how simple applied mathematics can be used to answer ecological questions.
I revised the whole of our 2nd year statistics course at St Andrews (55 lectures, 10 labs, 10 tutorials). The revision was based on trying to improve the coherence of the course, and on converting to a teaching method based on printed notes, with embedded examples so that students get to immediately apply material as it is taught.
I re-wrote the Generalized linear modelling course at St Andrews, to focus on generalized rather than purely linear models and to try and link application more closely to theory by taking a model matrix centred approach.
I wrote a third year undergraduate course on Likelihood based inference, which tried to provide an improved basis for practical work by emphasizing computational likelihood maximization and asymptotic justification of distributional results, rather than routine pencil and paper exercises on toy problems.
I wrote a third year course on linear mixed modelling, which tries to emphasize the links between ordinary linear modelling and linear mixed models for balanced data, before moving on to likelihood based methods for general linear mixed models.
I have also taught on 2 statistics service courses.
Re-wrote 20 lecture, 10 tutorial 2nd year Linear Modelling course at Bath.
Wrote 20 lecture, 10 lab/tut final year GLM course at Bath.
At graduate level I have written and given courses on fitting population dynamic models to data in summer and Winter schools in Cornell in the US and Woudshoton in the Netherlands; on statistical inference for population dynamic models on a PIMS workshop organised by the university of Calgary, Canada; on GAMs and other models for scientists at IFREMAR, Nantes and AZTI Lisbon; on GAMs at the UseR conference, 2006.