Lars Jermiin is an expert in evolutionary biology and bioinformatics, with particular strengths in molecular phylogenetics and comparative genomics. His interests spans the ways in which genes and gene products, populations, and species diverge and adapt to changing environments. He has applied his knowledge and methodologies in a variety of areas, including genome annotation, evolution, biosecurity, and the development of novel enzymes.
Much of his research focuses on developing methods to extract information from genomic data in a statistically sound and computationally efficient manner. His current focus is on promoting a new phylogenetic protocol (NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics 2, lqaa041) — designed to mitigate model misspecification and confirmation bias — and on developing methods and tools to support this protocol. Among these are methods and tools to: (i) detect violations of phylogenetic assumptions; (ii) find optimal models of sequence evolution for data that evolved under clocklike conditions; (iii) obtain phylogenetic estimates from data that evolved under non-clocklike conditions; and (iv) assess whether phylogenetic estimates are affected by ascertainment bias.
