Joe has influenced Peter's career considerably! His work in Population genetics and Phylogenetics, in particular his work on maximum likelihood tree inference, bootstrapping phylogenies, and the coalescence have left a mark. The phylogenetic and population genetics community is lucky to profit from his curiosity and his relentless pursuit of theory and inference.

Sir John Frank Charles Kingman formalized the Coalescent in 1982 and laid the ground work for a revival of population genetics.