Prospective students, especially those from ECE, typically wonder what kind of work my area of research entails. Here is some background reading material that can help:

  • Read the first and second chapters from dissertation available at UT library. Also have a quick look at the reminder of the dissertation; should give you an idea.

  • This evolving textbook from my former advisor, Tandy Warnow is a good resource to understand phylogenetics and multiple sequence alignment, two of the main topics of my work.

  • I also recommend the following two textbooks for understanding more about computational biology and bininformatics.
    • Jones, Neil C., and Pavel Pevzner. An introduction to bioinformatics algorithms. MIT press, 2004.
    • Durbin, R., Eddy, S. R., Krogh, A., & Mitchison, G. (1998). Biological sequence analysis: probabilistic models of proteins and nucleic acids. Cambridge university press.

    You can find these in the library, and I have a copy I could lend you for a short time. There are many more interesting textbooks, and you should feel free to explore them.

  • Have a look at our papers on ASTRAL (#18 and #26), statistical binning (#22 and #25), and PASTA (#23) to understand our algorithmic work and look at our two flagship papers on avian and plant evolution to get and idea about the collaborative work we do with biologists (see #21 and #22).

  • I also invite you to have a quick look at publication from other researchers in this area. Contact me for a list of suggestions based on your interests.