Megan Owen
I am interested in combinatorics and computational
geometry problems in computational biology, bioinformatics,
computer science, and communication theory. My current
research focus is on developing efficient computational
methods for studying the evolutionary histories of organisms.
Specifically, several distance measures have been proposed to
quantitatively compare alternative phylogenetic trees for the
same set of species. In my dissertation research, I used the
combinatorial and geometric properties of the space of
phylogenetic trees introduced by Billera et al. (2001) to
design a practical algorithm for computing one such distance.
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