Colloquium

Speaker: Nikita Alekseev (GWU)

Title: Combinatorial and Probabilistic approaches in Comparative Genomics.

Abstract: The ability to estimate the evolutionary distance between extant genomes plays a crucial role in modern phylogenomic studies. When we say "evolutionary distance between two genomes on the same set of genes" we mean a number of genome rearrangements which transformed one genome into another in the course of evolution. In this talk we discuss how to find the evolutionary distance within different mathematical models. We demonstrate combinatorial and probabilistic approaches to the problem.

Bio: Dr. Nikita Alexeev is a postdoctoral researcher in Computational Biology Institute at the George Washington University. He graduated from St. Petersburg State University (Russia) with a PhD in Mathematics and Statistics in 2012. During 2008-2011 he was a visiting researcher in Bielefeld University, Germany. During 2011-2014 he was a researcher at the Chebyshev Laboratory, SPbSU. His research interests are Combinatorics, Graph Theory, Probability Theory and Computational Biology.