Elizabeth Allman
2005 | Professor of Mathematics
University of California, Los Angeles 1995, PhD
CH 308B | 907-474-2479
e.allman@alaska.edu
My research is focused on developing methods for phylogenetic inference, and assessing the statistical soundness of tree and network construction methods. Such trees, ubiquitous in scientific papers, are used to understand the evolutionary history of species, the dynamics of virus transmission, the diversity of life on earth, and many other applications. Specifically, our group is currently interested in modeling incomplete lineage sorting using the Multispecies Coalescent Model and its extension to networks. Recent group members have been involved in developing hypothesis tests for the MSC on a tree and in consistent distance-based network construction from multilocus gene tree data. Others have used algebraic techniques to prove parameter identifiability for a complex protein data site substitution model. This field is inherently interdisciplinary in nature, using techniques from mathematics, statistics, biology, and computer science. Interests in probability and modeling, computational algebra, graph theory, combinatorics, and programming can all be useful in this research area.
Highlighted work:
Allman, H. Banos,* and J. Rhodes, "NANUQ: A method for inferring species networksfrom gene trees under the coalescent model," Algorithms for Molecular Biology, (14) no. 24 (2019).
E. Allman, H. Banos,* J. Mitchell,* and J. Rhodes, "MSCquartets 1.0: Quartet methods for species trees and networks under the multispecies coalescent model in R." Bioinformatics, (37) no. 12 (2021) 1766-1768.
E. Allman and J. Rhodes, "Trees, Fast and Accurate," Science, (327) (2010) 1334-1335.
*denotes ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ graduate students or postdocs