Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY 2002

Rosenberg Noah A, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY2002. The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled "Inferring evolutionary importance of genes from the shapes of multi-species gene genealogies." It is predicted that loci causally involved in divergences of incipient species have gene trees that are monophyletic within species and concordant with species phylogenies. This research develops coalescent-based probabilistic models to describe shapes of multi-species gene genealogies. These models are being applied to genomic sequence data to identify loci potentially involved in species divergences.