Title: New Algorithms for Large-scale Species Tree Estimation

 

Abstract: Constructing the Tree of Life (i.e., a species tree containing all of the extant species) is a Scientific Grand Challenge that is surprisingly difficult from a computational and statistical perspective.  One of the challenges is that different parts of the genome evolve down different trees, due to processes such as incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) and gene duplication and loss (GDL). In this talk, I will present new algorithms that can estimate species trees under both processes with high accuracy, even on very large datasets (thousands of species and genes).  Moreover, our new methods for species tree estimation addressing GDL do not require knowledge of orthology.  Some of this work is unpublished.

Bio: Tandy Warnow is the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tandy received her PhD in Mathematics at UC Berkeley under the direction of Gene Lawler, and her research focuses on reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories. She was awarded the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award (1996), a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2003), and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2011). She was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2015 and of the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2021.