Building and using dated phylogenies in the presence of bacterial recombination

Xavier Didelot
Professor, School of Life Sciences,
The University of Warwick, UK

My research is concerned with understanding the way bacterial pathogens evolve, spread and cause disease. I have analysed both epidemiological and genomic data from a wide range of bacteria. A key aim is to develop new bioinformatics and statistical methods that can handle the very large amounts of data made available by novel high-throughput sequencing techniques. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of my work, I have broad interests in a variety of subjects, including theoretical topics such as mathematical population genetics, Bayesian statistics or Monte-Carlo methods, and biological topics such as bacterial evolutionary processes or pathogen epidemiology.