UBC Math Bio Seminar: Alex Beams

Phylogenetic trees are mathematical objects that encode information about ancestry relationships and are often used in the interpretation of genomic data. They have proved especially useful for advancing our understanding of pathogen populations that evolve on observable timescales, and the construction of phylogenies and our interpretations of them rely on mathematical models at every step. In this talk, we will discuss ongoing projects that focus on the bacterium that causes Tuberculosis. In the first project, we connect compartmental models of disease transmission to pathogen phylogenies in order to understand how epidemiological processes affect tree shape. In the second project, we aim to reconstruct movement patterns on phylogenies to inform the likely efficacy of geographically-targeted public health interventions. In both of these projects, mathematical models play an essential role in the interpretation of phylogenies, and that seems likely to be the case for any statistical inferences we hope to draw from genomic data for the foreseeable future.