Cora Allen-Savietta (Statistics) works with Cécile Ané (Statistics, Botany) and Sebastien Roch (Mathematics) to develop efficient methods to infer evolutionary history and identify ancient hybridizations. As the challenge of this work is to reconstruct ancestry using only modern data, she explores the identifiability of a network’s topology from sequence data only at the leaves. She is also expanding tree rearrangements and existing search strategies to explore the large and discrete space of semi-directed networks. Her work has applications to understanding the history of eukaryotes, viruses, languages, and more.
