DATE:

Friday, April 26, 2019

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS-314

SPEAKER:

Jeet Sukumaran, Ph.D, Assistant Professor, Biology Department, SDSU.

ABSTRACT:

Macroevolutionary models such as those used, for example, in biogeographical
analysis, typically tend to abstract away or exclude microevolutionary mechanisms
such as ecological interactions. This is done for computational tractability, but
comes at the cost of limiting the types of questions that can be asked or enforcing
assumptions that may undermine the answers even of questions that can be asked.
My research program is directed at connecting microevolutionary mechanisms to
macroevolutionary processes, drawing on promising alternative approaches such as
statistical or machine learning to overcome the computational challenges posed
by these complex models. Incorporation of microevolutionary mechanisms into
macroevolutionary models allows us to study not just pattern, but the processes
that generate those patterns. Here I show how with these approaches, we are able
to incorporate habitat affinities into biogeographical analyses and population-level
isolation into genomic species delimitation analyses.”

HOST:

Jose Castillo

DOWNLOAD:

PDF File