After study biology at Oxford University, Joe completed a PhD in Theoretical Phylogenetics at Bristol University before working as a fisheries biologist for the Scottish Government for three years. In 2006 he moved to Canada and shortly thereafter formed Poisson Consulting where he is a senior computational biologist specializing in Bayesian analysis, development of R packages and fish population ecology.

Joe, who is a Registered Professional Biologist with the College of Applied Biology, has co-authored over 25 peer-reviewed papers in journals such as the Journal of Open Source Software, the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, and Ecological Solutions and Evidence. In addition to hand coding Bayesian models in JAGS and Stan to answer important questions for Indigenous, governmental, industrial and conservation clients, Joe enjoys teaching. His courses include Understanding Statistics and Decision Making for Natural Resource Managers and a 16 week study group on Statistical Rethinking both for the Columbia Mountain Institute of Applied Ecology.

During his PhD, he co-developed RadCon a C++ MacOS program to for manipulating and analyzing phylogenetic trees. He has since developed over 30 R packages including ssdtools which is used by Canada, Australia and New Zealand to derive water quality guidelines.

In his spare time Joe enjoys trail running and surfing.