THE DENCH DESK
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Research Interests:

I'm keenly interested to understand the multi-factorial dynamics of evolution.  Ultimately the goal is to improve our ability to predict evolution.  There are any number of brilliant groups working on system specific drivers of evolutionary response, but to develop general predictive theory we need to tie these pieces of information together.  One of the main challenges to this approach is that as we add more factors to our models, we're making more assumptions.  At what point does the effort to include more factors change our models from empirically grounded to pure conjecture?  My work tries to combine theoretical, computational, and in vivo approaches to address these challenges.  Some of my main research questions boil down to:
  1. What affect do the interactions between factors have on evolutionary response?
  2. Can we better estimate the underlying parameters that are driving evolution?
  3. How many alternative adaptive trajectories exist, and can we predict this?

Teaching:
I'm the founder of Univeristy of Ottawa's "How R, You?" support group for programming in R, statistics and modelling.  I love meeting with my peers and helping them move their research forward.  Without this experience I'd have never have gotten to know a number of my fellows as well as I do.  I find I learn so much about alternative approaches and invite anyone looking for support to  contact me  to find out more about this group.
Coding:
I'm also interested in creating tools which facilitate the research of others.  During my work at uOttawa I've had the opportunity to help support the work of groups working in diverse fields such as biochemistry and comparative physiology.   One of my published tools is  AEGIS , a pipeline for exploring correlated evolution from genomic sequences.  Follow the link to visit the GitHub page of Dr. Aris-Brosou where it can be found.
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