Nielsen's Lab:  What is the difference between a human and a
chimpanzee? What plants comprised the ancient flora of
Greenland? When and where did the wooly mammoth roam? And what
do these questions have to do with each another? To start with,
they can all be answered using slender strands of DNA. And using
computational methods devised by IB professor Rasmus Nielsen.
"I'm interested how you can use statistics and computational
tools to elucidate evolution," says Nielsen. In evolutionary
biology, "you want to know about what happened in the past. In
some sense, you can formulate this as a classical statistical
problem of inference"--you start with some data, and you draw
conclusions from those data. "I wanted to learn about
evolution," says Nielsen, "but I realized many evolutionary
problems are really fundamentally statistical problems."
Nielsen develops computational methods for comparing DNA
sequences, and applies these methods to a variety of genomic
research projects.  "In genomics there's tons of data