IAP Poster Competition Winners for Fall 2009
Grant's research deals with improving software that produces phylogenetic trees. "Phylogenetic trees show the evolutionary relationships between a set of organisms. They are used to track deadly diseases, develop new drugs, and determine how species evolved. Phylogenetic trees are created using phylogenetic heuristics that attempt to solve NP-hard optimization criteria. These phylogenetic heuristics often do not converge resulting in unstable evolutionary trees." How can we detect what organisms are preventing a phylogenetic heuristic from converging to a robust solution? "In simple terms, I take the whole output of the search algorithm and compute an average value. Then I generate new data set each data set having a single organism removed and take the average values of these sets. By looking at how the removal of each organism effects the score I can measure the stability of each organism. The goal is to provide a robust solution for biologists who confront issues with their heuristic searches." Grant conducts his research using data provided by Dr. Margaret Glasner in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics.
Also placing in the contest was Brandon Paulson who won 2nd Place for his poster "An Algorithm for Recognizing Sketched Multi-stroke Primatives." Brandon's advisor is Dr. Tracy Hammond. Receiving the award for 3rd place, Mike George presented the poster entitled "DistressNet: Situational Awareness for Disaster Response." He is advised by Dr. Radu Stoleru.
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The fall 2009 IAP Meeting was a great success in part due to our IAP Poster contest. Over 25 posters were submitted for this event. 1st place was awarded to Grant Brammer, who presented a poster entitled "Identifying Rogue Taxa to More Efficiently Reconstruct Evolutionary Trees." Mr. Brammer's advisor is Dr. Tiffani Williams.
