My research revolves around statistical phylogenetics and its applications to evolutionary biology. In particular, I focus on Bayesian techniques for inferring phylogenies. I have contributed to development of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods used to implement Bayesian tree inference, but my primary interest is in the evolutionary models and prior assumptions that underlie these methods. Improvements to models allow us to estimate trees more accurately and assess the error in our estimates. More importantly, the development of richer models lets us use the comparative approach to a wide range of biological problems
