"Computational Insights into Population Biology" by Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois
Event details
| Date | 06.04.2010 |
| Hour | 16:15 |
| Speaker | Tanya Berger-Wolf |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract
Computation has fundamentally changed the way we study nature. Recent breakthroughs in data collection technology, such as GPS and other mobile sensors, gene sequencing, and microsatellite genotyping, are giving biologists access to data about wild populations, from genetic to social interactions, which are orders of magnitude richer than any previously collected. Such data offer the promise of answering some of the big questions in population biology: How do animals form social groups and how do genetic ties affect this process? Which individuals are leaders and to what degree do they control the behavior of others?
How do social interactions affect the survival of a species?
Unfortunately, in this domain, our ability to analyze data lags substantially behind our ability to collect it. In this talk I will present new computational approaches for solving problems arising in population biology. On the genetic side, I will present methods for inferring kinship relationships from genetic data in wild populations.
At the other end of the biological scale, I will discuss a novel computational framework for analysis of dynamic social interaction networks and its applications to analyzing the structure of social dynamics in zebra (and human) populations. Combined, the two approaches lay the foundation for an emerging field of computational population biology.
Biography
Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she heads the Computational Population Biology Lab. Her research interests are in applications of combinatorial optimization analysis and algorithm design techniques to problems in population biology of plants, animals, and humans, from genetics to social interactions.
Dr. Berger-Wolf has received her B.Sc. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Hebrew University (Jerusalem, Israel) and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. She has spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico working in computational phylogenetics and a year at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) doing research in computational epidemiology. She has received numerous awards for her research and mentoring, including the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2008.
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- Christine Moscioni