EADS talk by Katherine St. John

Katherine St. John, professor at City University of New York & American Museum of Natural History, will give an EADS talk on 'Improving Searches for Evolutionary Trees'.

Abstract

Evolutionary histories, or phylogenies, form an integral part of much work in biology. In addition to the intrinsic interest in the interrelationships between species, phylogenies are used for drug design, multiple sequence alignment, and even as evidence in a recent criminal trial. A simple representation for a phylogeny is a rooted, binary tree, where the leaves represent the species, and internal nodes represent their hypothetical ancestors. For even this simple way to represent evolution, finding the optima for a bimolecular sequences for a fixed set of species is NP-hard. This talk will focus on some of the elegant questions that arise from improving search in this highly structured space. We will also intriguing results about assembling, summarizing, and visualizing the space of phylogenetic trees. This talk assumes no background in biology and all are welcome.

Bio

Katherine St. John ia a professor in the mathematics and computer science department at Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She also hold appointments to the doctoral faculty of anthropology and of computer science at the Graduate Center of CUNY, as well as being a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History (invertebrate zoology and NYCEP).

Her research interests lie in the intersection of biology, computing, and mathematics, focusing on tree structures used to model evolutionary histories, binary search trees, and ways to compare and visualize these structures. 

Scientific Host:

Mikkel Thorup, Head of Centre for Efficient Algorithms and Data Structures