Application deadline: 30th January 2022.
Project description here.
Application pocedure here.

A Chinese Scholarship Council PhD Scholarship to work on development of Bayesian MCMC methods of the molecular clock is available in our lab. The molecular clock is the approximately constant rate of accumulation of single nucleotide changes in the genomes of organisms. By aligning the genomes of species and inferring the number of changes in the branches of their evolutionary tree, we can infer the geological times of the species divergences. The state-of-the-art in the field is to use Bayesian statistics, which requires computationally expensive stochastic simulation (MCMC) of evolutionary timelines. Building evolutionary timelines is one of the fundamental goals of biology as it allows inferring correlations between the origin of species and the geological past of the planet.

The project is suitable for students with interests in software development and statistical analysis of big data.

If you are interesting in learning more about the work in our lab, you can read our recent paper in Nature in which we inferred the evolutionary timeline of mammals:

  • Alvarez-Carretero et al. (2021) A species-level timeline of mammal evolution integrating phylogenomic data. Nature

We have also written a major review on the molecular clock:

  • dos Reis et al. (2016) Bayesian molecular clock dating of species divergences in the genomics era. Nature Reviews Genetics