Date: Tuesday 14 April 2026 – 15:00 (Europe/London)
Speaker: Leonardo de Oliveira Martins, Tenure Track Fellow at the University of Liverpool
Abstract
All living things are composed of many genes, and usually a gene in one species will have a correspondent in another species. We can estimate the evolutionary history of each set of corresponding genes, the so-called phylogeny of the gene, which is usually assumed to be a particular kind of tree. However, since we have many genes per species, we can have many estimated trees. They may differ due to estimation uncertainty, or due to real biological processes. In this talk I will describe how to model the biological information in order to reduce uncertainty in multi-gene phylogenetic estimation. And why this variability is important to understand resistance to antibiotics, pathogen surveillance, etc.
Biography
Leonardo de Oliveira Martins is a Bayesian computational biologist with interests in evolutionary genomics and large-scale statistical modelling under uncertainty. His work also focuses on engineering solutions for the analysis and sharing of One Health data, spanning microbial and biomedical domains. He is currently a Tenure Track Fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics at the University of Liverpool.
Previously, he worked as a staff scientist in microbial bioinformatics, where he developed and conducted phylogenetic analyses of SARS-CoV-2 genomes in the UK and globally. During his postdoctoral and doctoral training, he worked on the statistical analysis of hyperspectral and fluorescence microscopy images, the development of Bayesian and machine-learning models for large-scale phylogenomic problems, and Bayesian statistical methods applied to recombination, relaxed molecular clocks, and protein evolution.
