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SUMMARY:"Computational Insights into Population Biology" by Dr. Tanya Berg
 er-Wolf\, Assistant Professor\, Department of Computer Science\, Universit
 y of Illinois
DTSTART:20100406T161500
DTSTAMP:20260929T161051Z
UID:bd0bb45fadcf9299f673451ed890dbae47f642920a86fa32d0f7d3ee
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Tanya Berger-Wolf\nAbstract\nComputation has fundamentally cha
 nged the way we study nature. Recent breakthroughs in data collection tech
 nology\, such as GPS and other mobile sensors\, gene sequencing\, and micr
 osatellite genotyping\, are giving biologists access to data about wild po
 pulations\, from genetic to social interactions\, which are orders of magn
 itude 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 ind
 ividuals are leaders and to what degree do they control the behavior of ot
 hers?\nHow do social interactions affect the survival of a species?\n\nUnf
 ortunately\, in this domain\, our ability to analyze data lags substantial
 ly behind our ability to collect it. In this talk I will present new compu
 tational approaches for solving problems arising in population biology. On
  the genetic side\, I will present methods for inferring kinship relations
 hips from genetic data in wild populations.\nAt the other end of the biolo
 gical scale\, I will discuss a novel computational framework for analysis 
 of dynamic social interaction networks and its applications to analyzing t
 he structure of social dynamics in zebra (and human) populations. Combined
 \, the two approaches lay the foundation for an emerging field of computat
 ional population biology.\n\nBiography\nDr. Tanya Berger-Wolf is an assist
 ant professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of I
 llinois at Chicago where she heads the Computational Population Biology La
 b.  Her research interests are in applications of combinatorial optimizati
 on analysis and algorithm design techniques to problems in population biol
 ogy of plants\, animals\, and humans\, from genetics to social interaction
 s.\n\nDr. Berger-Wolf has received her B.Sc. in Computer Science and Mathe
 matics from Hebrew University (Jerusalem\, Israel) and her Ph.D. in Comput
 er Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. She ha
 s spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico
  working in computational phylogenetics and a year at the Center for Discr
 ete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) doing research i
 n computational epidemiology. She has received numerous awards for her res
 earch and mentoring\, including the US National Science Foundation CAREER 
 Award in 2008.
LOCATION:BC 01 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%2001
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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