PhD Defence Ruben Henri Meuwese

Keywords: Evolution, comparing hypotheses, problem size reduction, algorithms for intractable problems
 

"On the Origin of Agreement Forests A deep mathemathical analysis into optiminizing algorithms for kernelizing, and solving maximum agreement forest and maximum parsimony score problems in phulogenetics"

Biologists use all kinds of computational tools to create an accurate image of how species evolved. Ruben Meuwese improves some of these tools, allowing biologists to deepen their understanding of evolution. 

These analytical tools help gaining insights into phenomena such as population growth, migration, animal behaviour, and of course the evolution of species. All these insights rely on datasets containing observations from the real world. These datasets are never complete, simply because it is impossible to observe every detail in the world.  

Testing hypothesis on these datasets involves constructing and comparing different models that fit the dataset. Ruben uses mathematics to design faster algorithms for comparing these models, in this case: for comparing evolutionary trees. Speed-up is achieved by reducing datasets in size, without losing the information contained within them. 

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