Statistical Bioinformatics Seminar: Professor Eric Stone -- Getting serious about graphical structures in genome sciences

Hi All, For our Statistical Bioinformatics Seminar next Monday, we will be hosting
Professor Eric Stone from the ANU-CSIRO Centre for Genomics, Metabolomics and
Bioinformatics.  The seminars are held at 1:00 pm on Mondays at the Charles Perkins
Centre, Level 3 Large meeting room.  The format of the talk is approximately 40 minutes
plus discussion.  Further information can be found on the website
https://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/SemConf/StatisticalBioinformatics.html 

Monday September 23th 2019 1:00 PM 
Seminar Level 3 Large Meeting Room 
Charles Perkins Centre 

Speaker: Professor Eric Stone (ANU) 

Title: Getting serious about graphical structures in genome sciences 

Abstract: Systems biology, defined broadly, is the study of how components of a
biological system interact.  Graphs, meanwhile, are general representations of the
pairwise interactions (edges) between arbitrary components (vertices).  It is no wonder,
then, that graphs pervade systems biology and genome sciences in general.  This talk is
an attempt to lay some ground rules for making sense of them.  I will focus on the
ubiquitous issue of “missing vertices” that correspond to unmeasured components of
the biological system.  To do so, I will introduce a formal definition of graphs with
missing vertices, and I will discuss how and why these objects are amenable to theory.
Subsequently, I will discuss how theoretical results can be leveraged to make biological
inference.  I aim to provide a range of biological applications/illustrations spanning
phylogenetics, population genetics, systems biology and beyond.  While this talk will
synthesise concepts from mathematics (i.e.  spectral graph theory) and multivariate
statistics (i.e.  principal components analysis and multidimensional scaling),
accessibility is not predicated on previous knowledge.  

About the speaker: Eric is a quantitative biologist who combines statistical methods and
mathematical theory to investigate how genetic variation has shaped biological
diversity.  He studied Mathematics at the University of Florida and Princeton University
before training in Statistics and Genetics at Stanford University.  He joined the
Australian National University in mid-2016 after eleven years on the faculty at North
Carolina State University.  He is founding Director of the ANU Biological Data Science
Institute as well as Director of the ANU-CSIRO Centre for Genomics, Metabolomics and
Bioinformatics.  

See you there!