Kevin Liu awarded NSF CRII Grant

Kevin Liu, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, has been awarded an NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant for the project "Novel evolutionary models and algorithms to connect genomic sequence and phenotypic data".

This project will create new evolutionary models and algorithms for inferring species phylogenies from genomes while accounting for point mutations, genetic drift, and recombination. A connection is then forged to systems biology by building the new evolutionary models into a new computational method for mapping the genomic architecture of complex phenotypes. The new methods will be validated using an extensive performance study incorporating empirical and synthetic data. Analyses of the empirical data are anticipated to result in new biological discoveries such as understanding the genetic basis of adaptive traits in house mouse, the most widely used laboratory organism.

(Date Posted: 2016-03-01)