Dr. Alex Beams
Hello everyone!
I’m excited to announce our next Math-Bio seminar, happening next Wednesday, September 17th at 2:00 pm (Pacific Time) in the PIMS lounge (ESB 4133). PIMS tea will follow the seminar at around 3:00 pm.
Our speaker this week is Dr. Alex Beams, a post-doc at SFU. Below is more information about this exciting talk.
For those unable to attend in person, you can join via Zoom using the link below.
I hope to see you all there!
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://ubc.zoom.us/j/65246006268?pwd=vFrUpDrzPEYGZ3dSezvCp2uiupsdiO.1
Meeting ID: 652 4600 6268
Passcode: 988036
Phylogenetic trees are mathematical objects that encode information about ancestry relationships and are often used in the interpretation of genomic data. They have proved especially useful for advancing our understanding of pathogen populations that evolve on observable timescales, and the construction of phylogenies and our interpretations of them rely on mathematical models at every step. In this talk, we will discuss ongoing projects that focus on the bacterium that causes Tuberculosis. In the first project, we connect compartmental models of disease transmission to pathogen phylogenies in order to understand how epidemiological processes affect tree shape. In the second project, we aim to reconstruct movement patterns on phylogenies to inform the likely efficacy of geographically-targeted public health interventions. In both of these projects, mathematical models play an essential role in the interpretation of phylogenies, and that seems likely to be the case for any statistical inferences we hope to draw from genomic data for the foreseeable future.