They Blinded Me With Science

On this episode we're joined by University of Texas at Austin computer science PhD student, Siavash Mirarab, whose research focuses on large-scale phylogenetics. Siavash and his advisor Tandy Warnow developed a new technique for estimating evolutionary relationships ("statistical binning") that enabled an international consortium of researchers to redraw the bird family tree. He talks about this part of his PhD work which was recently published in Science magazine.  Join us to learn about the computational side of biology, where complex models and methodologies are used to understand evolution from Slavish Mirarab.