Saul Justin Newman

Saul Newman is an interdisciplinary scholar with a very broad background. His recent work includes first- and sole-author publications spanning plant science (Nature Plants), demography (Science Advances), and climate change (Nature Climate Change). Forthcoming research explores a potential drug-based modifier of human ageing, and highly disruptive research on the reliability of human old-age data. His research has been featured extensively in global news outlets including The Economist, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Newsweek, and Forbes magazine.

Dr Newman’s work spans a wide range of analytical methods, with previous research including private-public analyses of large genomic and environmental data using machine learning and artificial intelligence, more recent work on machine learning and satellite data, and theoretical work on the disruption of survival models by nonlinear error patterns.

His current work focuses on diverse questions in social science and biology, including the integration of machine learning into social sciences, the survival patterns of organisms and machines, and sociogenomics.

Saul also has a history of actively pursuing social good in the face of unethical science: speaking out against the Australian government’s support and funding of pro-alcohol research in the face of personal and legal threats, revealing socially questionable practices in the export of high-polluting vehicles from the UK to developing countries, and working to overturn the so-called ‘Blue Zones’ by using using reproducible analyses and open code to reveal how these claims have no connection to empirical reality.

Dr Newman received his PhD from the Australian National University’s John Curtin School of Medical Research in 2015 under Prof Simon Easteal, before working as a plant scientist for the Australian government. Dr Newman then returning to academia through in a joint appointment as a senior postdoctoral fellow, working in both the Research School of Biology and the newly-founded Biological Data Science Institute at the Australian National University. Dr Newman then took up a position at the University of Oxford in the Sociology department, before transferring to the Nuffield Department for Population Health. Saul also holds a position with the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at University College London, and is associated with University College Oxford.