Research Philosophy
I work as an applied statistician, with my motivation coming from struggles to understand the dynamics of biological systems. To this end, I develop statistical tools that assist biologists in quantifying and assessing evolutionary and ecological hypotheses.
Biological Questions
Perhaps the greatest interest for me is in viral and bacterial genetics, where data has become so plentiful that we can now model a number of different processes that are central to our understanding of evolution and living systems. In building tools for the scientific community, I focus primarily on those that relate to the following problems -
- flexible methods for sequence analysis through novel substitution distances;
- the integration of multiple scales of biological information into phylogenetic histories;
- estimation of spatiotemporal ecological structure;
- and, the properties of contingent systems.
Statistical Questions
As much as any other science, biology challenges both our understanding of the use of models and the meaning of hypothesis tests as methods for statistical assessment. My statistical interests follow these lines -
- phylogenetics with multiple data types;
- Bayesian model selection;
- robustness and robust statistics;
- inference from stochastic differential systems;
- and statistics for irreversible and non-stationary time series.
