Steven Kelk's homepage

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Department of Advanced Computing Sciences (formerly Data Science and Knowledge Engineering) at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, where I am the area coordinator of the Algorithms (formerly Algorithms, Complexity and Optimization (ALGOPT)) group. I am also the contact person at Maastricht for the Dutch discrete mathematics cluster DIAMANT (a current list of DIAMANT members at Maastricht can be found at the start of this presentation). My contact details are here. I was vice-chair of the Maastricht Young Academy (MYA) from 2017-2019.

Between 2004 and 2010 I was a postdoc in the Life Sciences cluster of the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, in the subgroup Combinatorial Problems in Biology. I obtained my PhD in late 2003 from the Algorithms and Computational Complexity Research Group at the University of Warwick. My supervisor was Leslie Goldberg.

My main research interests are graph theory, phylogenetics, fixed parameter tractability, combinatorics, algorithm engineering and computational biology. Here is a short video about my research.

Outside university I am active on issues relating to public services and social justice, particularly housing and education, and I am a board member of Housing Association Soweto. I fully support the occupation of the A12 in Den Haag by Extinction Rebellion on 28th January 2023.

Maastricht students: I am also available for bachelor and masters projects, see these slides for my preferred generic research topics. More detailed topics will be announced each year via the Bachelor/Master thesis coordinators.
2018 Lorentz workshop: Lorentz Center workshop

The Future of Phylogenetic Networks

 15 – 19 October 2012
Leiden, Netherlands


       Scientific organizers:
  • Leo van Iersel (Amsterdam)
  • Steven Kelk (Maastricht)
  • David Morrison (Uppsala)
  • Leen Stougie (Amsterdam)
Follow-up in July 2014! Click image below:

The Dutch Day on Optimization was held on 9th November 2023 in Maastricht, see this webpage. There is a news item here and there are some photos here.

Publications/Papers

See also my Google Scholar and DBLP pages -- note that DBLP only indexes my computer science publications, some bio(informatics) and math publications are missing. There is also a PDF of all my publications with full bibliographical information here (updated January 2024).

Links to pages of some regular co-authors

Links to books (etc.) about phylogenetic networks

Software for phylogenetic networks (and trees) - and related topics

Miscellaneous scientific links

Miscellaneous publications

Miscellaneous political links

Random stuff


Last updated: 15th March 2024.