Dr. Wallace is a Lecturer in RNA Systems Biology in the Institute of Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh. He started the research group in 2018, supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship from The Wellcome Trust and The Royal Society.

Before that, Dr. Wallace held a Marie Curie fellowship, also at The University of Edinburgh, working with Guido Sanguinetti and Jean Beggs on co-transcriptional splicing. He also pursued projects on regulation of protein synthesis and analysis of ribosome profiling data.

Dr. Wallace did his postdoctoral work with D. Allan Drummond, initially at Harvard University’s FAS Center for Systems Biology. He moved with the lab to the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago, and added experimental capabilities to his computational training. There, he surveyed the heat-triggered movement of proteins into RNA-protein granules, and showed that these proteins are released without detectable degradation as cells recover from stress.

Dr. Wallace received his Ph.D. in Mathematics, also at the University of Chicago, in 2010, working with Jack Cowan on stochastic dynamics of biological networks. His PhD work led to a collaboration with the late Dan Gillespie – of stochastic simulation algorithm fame – addressing the derivation and scope of the “Linear Noise Approximation” for stochastic processes.

Alongside his research, Dr. Wallace is an open science advocate and teaches data literacy to scientists, working with Edinburgh Carpentries.