Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Informatics for FY 2003

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Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Informatics are sponsored jointly by the Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Biological Sciences (BIO) to encourage research and training that cross the traditional disciplinary boundaries between them. These fellowships provide opportunities for interdisciplinary research and educational activities in biology and informatics to a wide range of recent doctoral recipients (biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and others) who seek to conduct research on biological questions using informatics tools and methods. It is expected that the Fellows trained through these fellowships will play an important role in training the future workforce. Postdoctoral training in informatics will permit junior scientists trained in biology, mathematical, chemical, and physical sciences to play key roles in developing new quantitative tools and methods that will advance informatics in biology and other fields. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled "Estimating evolutionary relationships from unaligned DNA sequences using Bayesian statistical methods." Aligning DNA sequences to determine which sites are comparable is a crucial step in almost all of the sequence analyses that underlie molecular bioinformatics. Estimates of the evolutionary relationships between sequences can help guide alignment, and more accurate alignments can assist phylogenetic inference. Statistical methods for simultaneously aligning sequences and inferring evolutionary trees are being investigated, compared, and implemented in free software.