Toward the Network of Life: Detecting Hybridization and Inferring Phylogenetic Networks in the Genomic Era
In this talk, I will present the performance of four popular computational methods that detect hybridization from genomic data without inferring phylogenetic networks, discussing their significance and limitations. Then, I will explain how phylogenetic networks generalize trees to represent complex evolutionary histories and explore the biological interpretations that can be drawn from various branching patterns. Finally, I will introduce the novel method PhyNEST (Phylogenetic Network Estimation using SiTe patterns), which efficiently and accurately infers phylogenetic networks directly from sequence data using composite likelihood. PhyNEST is implemented in an open-source Julia package and is available at https://github.com/sungsik-kong/PhyNEST.jl”.
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SUNGSIK KONG
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SUNGSIK KONG
He is a semester postdoctoral fellow at The Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) at Brown University for fall 2024. He was a postdoctoral research associate in the Solis-Lemus Lab at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received my Ph.D. in Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology at the Ohio State University advised by Dr. Laura Kubatko, in 2023.
His research program centers on phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary history and relationships on our planet. I am particularly interested in developing scalable methods for inferring phylogenetic networks to understand the role of complex evolutionary histories (e.g., hybridization) in shaping contemporary biodiversity. His research transcends academic and geographic boundaries, and I often collaborate with theoretical and empirical biologists, statisticians, algebraic mathematicians, computer scientists, conservation biologists, and policymakers from various countries. In addition to my scientific contributions, He acts as a ‘bridge’ in collaborative work, promoting fluent communication between disciplines and cultural backgrounds.
He conferred B.Sc. and M.Sc. at University of Toronto, Canada, where I studied evolutionary biology and phylogenetics, advised by Dr. Robert Murphy. He also studied the evolution of Primate behavior with Dr. Deborah McLennan. He spent many years with Eric Davies at Urban Biodiversity and Forestry Laboratory as a Biodiversity Technician. Moreover, He worked as a researcher at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea, with Drs. Yikweon Jang and Jae Chun Choe.