Dr Joseph Heled

The University of Auckland

Joseph Heled is a software engineer with over 20 years experience in designing and coding large and small systems, specialising in efficient algorithms and optimization. He completed a PhD in 2010 and is currently a part time post-doc in the University of Auckland. His research lies at the interface between computing, discrete mathematics and statistical genetics. His PhD thesis titled "Bayesian Computational Inference of Species Trees and Population Sizes" focused on the design and development of computationally intensive statistical inference software for use in population genetics and phylogenetics.

Species and Gene trees: Inference, Summary and Visualization

Computer cycles are getting cheaper exponentially for the past 40 years, and the cost of DNA sequencing is declining even faster. Both technological achievements are responsible for the re-birth of phylogenetics, where the digital information in genetic data is used to infer organisms relatedness by employing powerful statistical methods. In my talk I will briefly review the history of inferring species family trees, introduce a recent Bayesian method which uses data from multiple organisms in closely related species, and show how the method output can be visualized to better understand the results.