Siavash Mirarab is an Associate Professor in the ECE Department at the University of California, San Diego, and is also affiliated with the CSE department and the Center for Microbiome Innovation. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Computer Science department at UT-Austin and was advised by Prof. Tandy Warnow. His Ph.D. research was supported by an NSERC PGS award and Howard Hughes Medical Institute international student fellowship, and his dissertation won the honorable mention for the 2015 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. He has been a recipient of the 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship in Computational & Evolutionary Molecular Biology, the NSF CAREER award, and the MIRA (R35) awrd from NIGMS (NIH). He has contributed to many international projects and is part of the Vertebrate Genome Project Council. His interest is in computational biology. His lab develops methods that target large-scale analyses in various areas, including phylogenomics, large-scale multiple sequence alignment, HIV transmission network reconstruction, and metagenomic analyses using phylogenetic approaches.