Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Estimating the Tree of Life is one of the grand computational challenges in Science, and has applications to many areas of science and biomedical research. Despite intensive research over the last several decades, many problems remain inadequately solved. In this talk I will discuss species tree estimation from genome-scale datasets. I will describe the current state of the art for these problems, what is understood about these problems from a mathematical perspective, and identify some of the open problems in this area where mathematical research, drawing from graph theory, combinatorial optimization, and probability and statistics, is needed. This talk will be accessible to mathematicians, computer scientists, probabilists and statisticians, and does not require any knowledge of biology. (Refreshments will be served after the talk.)