Brandon Legried
Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer
Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Mathematics
Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology
Research
Research questions and goals
Currently, I am interested in the statistical inference of models arising in phylogenetics.
These models arise in a variety of settings, such as:Â
The Tree of Life: How do we classify the great variety of organisms in the past and present? How many classifications (often called species) are there or have ever existed? At what rate do species appear and go extinct?
Epidemiology:Â In what ways is a pathogen transmitted throughout a host population?
Genomics: What mechanisms drive DNA, RNA, and proteins? How are evolutionary selection and the structure/function of the genome related?
methods
My work experience and education has made it so that I spend most of my research time writing mathematics and running simulations. The mathematical tools are both classical and modern techniques within Markov processes, concentration, information theory, numerical analysis, mathematical statistics, and combinatorics.Â
publications
Preprints
Identifiability and inference of phylogenetic birth-death models. bioRxiv
Submitted, 2022. With Jonathan Terhorst.
2. Pairwise sequence alignment at arbitrarily large evolutionary distance. arXiv
Submitted, 2022. With Sebastien Roch.
Journal Articles
3. Impossibility of phylogeny reconstruction from k-mer counts. Â arXiv
Accepted to appear:Â Annals of Applied Probability, 2022.
With Wai-Tong (Louis) Fan and Sebastien Roch.
4. Species tree estimation under joint modeling of coalescence and duplication: sample complexity of quartet methods. Â arXiv
Accepted to appear:Â Annals of Applied Probability, 2022.
With Max Hill and Sebastien Roch.
5. Rates of convergence under the two-island and isolation-with-migration models. Print
Theoretical Population Biology, Volume 147, 2022.
With Jonathan Terhorst.
6. A class of identifiable phylogenetic birth-death models. Print
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(35): e2119513199, 2022.
With Jonathan Terhorst.
7. Polynomial-time statistical estimation of species trees
under gene duplication and loss. Print
Journal of Computational Biology, 28(5):Â 452, 2021.
With Erin K. Molloy, Tandy Warnow, and Sebastien Roch.
8. Impossibility of consistent distance estimation from sequence lengths
under the TKF91 model. Â Print
Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 82(9): 123, 2020.
With Wai-Tong (Louis) Fan and Sebastien Roch.
Conference Proceedings
9. Polynomial-time statistical estimation of species trees
under gene duplication and loss. Print
Proceedings of RECOMB 2020, 120-135.
With Erin K. Molloy, Tandy Warnow, and Sebastien Roch.