"During his time at Oxford, as well as holding a Fellowship at St Anne's College from 1978 to 1985, Kingman also chaired the Science and Engineering Research Council (now the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)) from 1981 to 1985, was vice-president of the Institute of Statisticians from 1978 until 1992 and held visiting appointments at the University of Western Australia (1974) and the Australian National University (1978).It was also during this time that Kingman developed the theory of the "Coalescent" or "Coalescent theory", a backwards-in-time theory of individuals in historical populations that, because it greatly simplifies computation, underlies much of modern population genomics .