Our lab member, Sandra Álvarez-Carretero, has won the prestigious Ernst Mayr Prize awarded by the Society of Systematic Biologists to the best graduate student talk at Evolution 2019. Previous winners include John Huelsenbeck, Scott Edwards, Hopi E. Hoekstra, and Alexei Drummond.

Sandra won for her work on quantitative morphological characters for Bayesian inference of divergence times on phylogenies (Álvarez-Carretero et al. 2019). The new method combines Felsenstein’s (1973) quantitative-character phylogenetic likelihood function together with Rannala and Yang’s (2007) Bayesian relaxed-clock inference machinery, and explores the effect of character correlations on the inference procedure. The method is implemented in the MCMCTree program for Bayesian inference of divergence times, and comes with an accompanying R package (mcmc3r). The paper is a collaboration with Anjali Goswami (National History Museum, London) and Ziheng Yang (University College London).

References

  • Álvarez-Carretero S, Goswami A, Yang Z, and dos Reis M. (2019) Bayesian estimation of species divergence times using correlated quantitative characters. Systematic Biology. DOI: 10.1093/sysbio/syz015

  • Felsenstein J. (1973) Maximum likelihood estimation of evolutionary trees from continuous characters. American Journal of Human Genetics, 25: 471-492. DOI:10.2307/2412304

  • Rannala B, Yang Z. (2007) Inferring speciation times under an episodic molecular clock. Systematic Biology, 56: 453-466. DOI: 10.1080/10635150701420643