Phyleaux Lab graduate student, Genevieve Mount, recently received a travel award to attend a Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB)-sponsored workshop on "Model-Based Molecular Systematics" in Guarujá, Brazil as part of the 2015 Evolution meetings. Congratulations, Genevieve!

Two postdoctoral researcher positions are available in the computational evolutionary biology lab of Jeremy M. Brown at Louisiana State University. Research in the Brown lab is broadly centered on the use of phylogenetic approaches to understand organismal history and molecular evolution.

The Phyleaux Lab has a new paper available via Advance Access in Systematic Biology. This paper was spearheaded by Brad Nelson and explores the use of existing information (contained in other sequence datasets) to set informed branch-length priors for Bayesian phylogenetic analyses. The approach seems promising for branch lengths and may be applicable to other parameters in phylogenetic models. If interested, you can find the paper here:

Jeremy is teaching a graduate-level course on Computational Phylogenetics during the spring 2015 semester. The course involves a lot of coding in Python and we're keeping all course material on GitHub. Feel free to follow along here: https://github.com/jembrown/CompPhylo_Spr2015.

Oh, and it's Mardi Gras season in Louisiana! Come visit for the king cake, parades, and a great time.

The Brown Phyleaux Lab has experienced quite a bit of turnover in the past few months. Several excellent and talented lab members have moved on to explore new frontiers. Chelsea Kliebert, an undergraduate researcher, graduated from LSU in May 2014 and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in the Chemical and Systems Biology graduate program at Stanford. Jeremy Ash, a research associate, started working in the lab in February 2014 and then began work on a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics at North Carolina State in August.

Congratulations to Brad Nelson, who recently became the first Master's graduate from the Brown Phyleaux lab. Brad's thesis includes two very nice chapters on improving Bayesian branch-length inference by using informed priors and applying posterior predictive approaches to assess the reliability of an inferred squamate phylogeny. Click here to download it.

A postdoctoral researcher position is available in the computational evolutionary biology lab of Jeremy M. Brown. This position is part of a project funded by the National Science Foundation to develop and apply a suite of related statistical approaches for assessing the fit of stochastic models to sequence and trait data. The goal of this work is to identify when phylogenetic and comparative inferences might be compromised by poor model fit.

Jeremy Ash, a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, has joined the lab as a Research Associate. Jeremy will be working on a project funded by the NSF Advances in Biological Informatics program to explore network-based approaches for characterizing and quantifying phylogenetic signal in large sets of trees. This project is collaborative with Jim Wilgenbusch, Kyle Gallivan, Wen Huang, Guifang Zhou, and Melissa Marchand at Florida State University.