I am on leave for the 2012-2013 academic year, and will return in August 2013.

Siavash Mirarab, my PhD student, has been awarded a fellowship by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Please see the webpage for the Symposium and Workshop on New Methods for Phylogenomics and Metagenomics that was held at UT-Austin on Feb 16 and 17, 2013.

My research focuses on the development of mathematical models and algorithms for estimating evolutionary history in Biology and Historical Linguistics. The main objective is to develop methods that produce much more accurate estimations of evolutionary history than can be obtained using existing tools. Our group is distinguished from many other groups in computational biology due to our focus on ultra-large datasets (anywhere from 10,000 to 1,000,000 sequences). We use real data and perform simulations to evaluate the performance of methods that we develop. This research area inolves mathematics, probability, statistics, computer science, and intensive collaborations with domain specialists. My current research is funded by the National Science Foundation (DEB 0733029 and DBI-1062335). I also recently benefited from support of the John P. Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Click here for Google Scholar Citations (i10-index 92, and h-index 41).

The CIPRES Project is finally over, but the CIPRES Portal is still available through the TeraGrid. For an abridged version of our final report, see this. The CIPRES Science Gateway, story.

"Plus de détails, plus de détails, disait-il à son fils, il n'y a d'originalité et de vérité que dans les détails..." -- Stendhal, Lucien Leuwen (a quote much loved by my stepfather, Martin J. Klein, and an essential guide for all scholarship).

Collaborations

My students and I are actively working on developing new methods for estimating alignments and trees (both gene trees and species trees), as well as for taxon identification of metagenomic data. We are currently working with three international research projects, two involved with estimating the Avian phylogeny, and also the Thousand Transcriptome Project (1KP), using our methods to estimate alignments and trees on individual genes, and to estimate species trees from these multi-marker datasets. We welcome collaborations with biologists who have data that are difficult to analyze, either because the datasets are too large for current methods, or because current methods fail to have sufficiently high accuracy. 


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