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Joseph Heled

Joseph Heled was an Israeli-New Zealand bioinformatician known for co-developing the *BEAST method for Bayesian species tree inference and the BEAST 2 software platform.

1961 to 2025The *BEAST species tree methodDeveloping BEAST 2GNU Backgammon neural networksThe Hebrew song translation project

Born: 23 February 1961, Hukok
Died: 18 March 2025
Occupation: researcher
Education: University of Auckland

Joseph Heled was born in 1961 in Hukok

Heled was born in Jerusalem in 1961. He grew up in Kibbutz Hukok in northern Israel and attended Beit Yerach High School.

He served in the IDF in Unit 8200. He took part in Operation Mole Cricket 19 against the Syrian air defense system.

He later moved to New Zealand and earned a PhD at the University of Auckland under Alexei Drummond. In 2011 his thesis won the university's Vice-Chancellor's Prize for doctoral theses. He then continued as a research fellow in the university's computer science department.

In 2010 he and Drummond published *BEAST, a method that estimates species trees, gene trees and ancestral population sizes together. He was a core developer of BEAST 2 and worked on tree visualization tools such as DensiTree 2. He also helped develop the neural network evaluators of GNU Backgammon.

From 2014 he ran a project documenting Hebrew songs written to foreign tunes. In 2018 his Hebrew translation of Richard Morgan's novel Altered Carbon was published. He died in 2025.

Joseph Heled's life in 8 milestones

1961
Born in Jerusalem.
2008
Published a method for population size history from multiple loci.
2010
Published the *BEAST method with Alexei Drummond.
2011
Won the University of Auckland Vice-Chancellor's Prize for his doctoral thesis.
2014
Took part in the release of BEAST 2 and began the Hebrew song project.
2018
Published a Hebrew translation of Altered Carbon.
2019
Contributed to BEAST 2.5.
2025
Died.