Faculty

Robert R Sokal

Robert R. Sokal is a S.U.N.Y. Distinguished Professor Emeritus and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Sciences. He has long been active in promoting the use of statistics in biology and co-founded the field of numerical taxonomy. Together with P.H.A. Sneath, he authored the two defining texts in this field. Along with colleague F. James Rohlf, he is the author of the very popular biostatistics book, Biometry, now in its third edition. He has been the editor of the American Naturalist and the president of several learned societies.

Currently he is involved in the following areas of research:

• Analysis of population structure based on human blood groups and polymorphisms, especially in Europe.
• Ethnohistory of Europe as related to gene frequency patterns. Visit our Ethnohistory WWW page page for related information.
• The relation between language and genetic variation.
• Genetic evidence for the origin of Indo-Europeans.
• Several projects on spatial analysis in population biology.

Selected Publications

• Sokal, R.R., N.L. Oden, and B.A. Thomson. 1999. A problem with synthetic maps. Human Biology 71: 1-13.
• Rosenberg, M.S., R.R. Sokal, N.L. Oden, and D. DiGiovanni. 1999. Spatial autocorrelation of cancer in Western Europe. European Journal of Epidemiology 15: 15-22.
• Sokal, R.R., and B.A. Thomson. 1998. Spatial genetic structure of human populations in Japan. Human Biology 70: 1-22.
• Sokal, R.R., N.L. Oden, and B.A. Thomson. 1998. Local spatial autocorrelation in biological variables. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 65: 41-62.
• Sokal, R.R., N.L. Oden, and B.A. Thomson. 1998. Local spatial autocorrelation in a biological model. Geographical Analysis 30: 331-354.
• Sokal, R.R., N.L. Oden, M.S. Rosenberg, and D. DiGiovanni. 1997. Ethnohistory, genetics, and cancer mortality in Europeans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 94: 12728-12731.
• Sokal, R.R., N.L. Oden, M.S. Rosenberg, and D. DiGiovanni. 1997. Sokal, R.R., N.L. Oden, J. Walker, and D.M. Waddle. 1997. Using distance matrices to choose between competing theories and an application to the origin of modern humans. Journal of Human Evolution 32: 501-522.
• Sokal, R.R., N.L. Oden, M.S. Rosenberg, and D. DiGiovanni. 1997. Sokal, R.R., N.L. Oden, M.S. Rosenberg, and D. DiGiovanni. 1997. The patterns of historical population movements in Europe and some of their genetic consequences. American Journal of Human Biology 9: 391-404.