Dr Mark Jones

Dr Mark Jones
NameDr Mark Jones
Job titleLecturer in Computer Science
Research institute
Primary appointmentComputer Science
Email addressm.jones@mdx.ac.uk
ORCIDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-4091-7089
Contact categoryAcademic staff

Biography

Biography

I joined Middlesex University in 2026. Before that, I held post-doc positions at TU Delft and CWI in the Netherlands, Université de Montpellier in France, and Royal Holloway, University of London. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science from Royal Holloway in 2013.

My research focuses on problems in phylogenetics, the field concerned with inferring evolutionary histories from genetic data. A lot of my research involves the development of fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithms, which allow NP-hard problems to be solved efficiently as long as one or more structural parameters are bounded.

Teaching

  • Module leader: CST3144 Full Stack Development
  • Module tutor: CST1110 Programming
  • Module tutor: CST1133 Foundations of Computing 
  • Module tutor: CST3990 Undergraduate Individual Project

Supervision

Education and qualifications

Grants

Prizes and Awards

Research outputs

Bounds on the sequence length sufficient to reconstruct binary level-1 phylogenetic networks under the CFN model

Frohn, M., Holtgrefe, N., van Iersel, L., Jones, M. and Kelk, S. 2026. Bounds on the sequence length sufficient to reconstruct binary level-1 phylogenetic networks under the CFN model. Annals of Combinatorics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00026-026-00830-0

Exact and heuristic computation of the scanwidth of directed acyclic graphs

Holtgrefe, N., van Iersel, L. and Jones, M. 2026. Exact and heuristic computation of the scanwidth of directed acyclic graphs. Journal of Computer and System Sciences. 106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcss.2026.103802

Squirrel: reconstructing semi-directed phylogenetic level-1 networks from four-leaved networks or sequence alignments

Holtgrefe, N., Huber, K.T., van Iersel, L., Jones, M., Martin, S. and Moulton, V. 2025. Squirrel: reconstructing semi-directed phylogenetic level-1 networks from four-leaved networks or sequence alignments. Molecular Biology and Evolution. 42 (4). https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf067

A near-linear kernel for bounded-state parsimony distance

Deen, E., van Iersel, L., Janssen, R., Jones, M., Murakami, Y. and Zeh, N. 2024. A near-linear kernel for bounded-state parsimony distance. Journal of Computer and System Sciences. 140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcss.2023.103477

Level-2 networks from shortest and longest distances

Huber, K.T., van Iersel, L., Janssen, R., Jones, M., Moulton, V. and Murakami, Y. 2022. Level-2 networks from shortest and longest distances. Discrete Applied Mathematics. 306, pp. 138-165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dam.2021.09.026
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