About

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I’m an Associate Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology and Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California. I earned my Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from the University of Idaho, where I worked under the supervision of Dr. Luke Harmon. I then moved to the University of British Columbia to be a Izaak Killam/NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow, working with Dr. Sally Otto, and subsequently, a faculty member in the Department of Zoology from 2016-2022.

In my research, I use phylogenetic trees, graphical depictions of historical relationships, to study evolution at multiple scales—from the grandest (e.g., the origin of major groups of organisms) to the smallest (e.g., the transmission of viruses and the development of the adaptive immune system within an individual) of scales. While superficially disparate, these projects all revolve around a few common themes: I aim to define the outer boundaries of our knowledge and understand what we can and cannot learn about evolution from different types of data. 

Originally from Maple Ridge, British Columbia, I now live in Los Angeles, the most interesting city in the world, with my wife and our pets. There is not much separation between my work life and personal life: my primary hobby is reading and thinking about interesting problems of all sorts. I donate regularly to The Humane League.

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