Skip to main content Skip to secondary navigation
Main content start

Evolgenome: Mike Steel (UCanterbury), "The combinatorics of ‘capturing’ a phylogenetic tree from discrete data or distances"

Event Details:

Wednesday, April 10, 2019
12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT

Location

MSOB X303

Admission is free and open to the Stanford community. 

Abstract:
We consider two versions of the following question: What is the smallest amount of ‘data’ required to uniquely determine a phylogenetic (evolutionary) tree?  In the first version, the ‘data’ consists of a sequence of discrete states observed at the leaves of a tree, and these states are assumed to have evolved from an unknown ancestral state; either with or without homoplasy. For the second version, the data consists of leaf-to-leaf distances between certain pairs of leaves in the tree.  Both questions give rise to some interesting combinatorial subtleties, and lead to two recent mathematical results.


Brief Bio: 
Professor Mike Steel is director of the Biomathematics Research Centre at University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.

He applies mathematics to problems in evolutionary biology, particularly phylogenetics, reticulate evolution, conservation biology and origin of life.  He is an elected fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), fellow of the Royal Society of NZ, and is on the editorial board of Journal of Mathematical Biology and Bulletin of Mathematical Biology. He has published 260 research papers and 3 books.

Read about the Evolgenome program

Explore More Events