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SAMSI
19 T. W. Alexander Dr.
P.O. Box 14006
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
USA

+1 919 685 9322
maowen at samsi dot info

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.