Photo of DarwinDarwin founded evolutionary biology on the ideas that all species are related to one another through a history of common descent and that the the exquisite match between a species and its environment is explained by natural selection, a process in which individuals with beneficial mutations leave more offspring. Evolutionary biologists are now confronted by a wealth of genetic data in the form of whole genome sequences sampled from multiple species and multiple individuals within a species, gene expression data which is often known for multiple species, environmental DNA sequences, and information on genetic variation in a species in the form of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Analysis of this flood of data represents a major challenge to the field.

Research at the Center for Theoretical Evolutionary Genomics focuses on the analysis of genomic data. We develop phylogenetic and population genetic theory that are appropriate for the analysis of genomic data.