Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Informatics for FY 2003

跨学科信息学博士后研究奖学金由数学和物理科学理事会(MPS)和生物科学理事会(BIO)联合赞助，以鼓励跨越它们之间传统学科界限的研究和培训。这些奖学金为寻求使用信息学工具和方法对生物学问题进行研究的众多新近获得博士学位的人(生物学家、化学家、物理学家、数学家、统计学家、计算机科学家等)提供了在生物学和信息学方面进行跨学科研究和教育活动的机会。预计通过这些研究金培训的研究员将在培训未来的工作人员方面发挥重要作用。信息学博士后培训将允许受过生物、数学、化学和物理科学培训的初级科学家在开发新的量化工具和方法方面发挥关键作用，这些工具和方法将促进生物学和其他领域的信息学。该奖学金的研究和培训计划名为“使用贝叶斯统计方法从未比对的DNA序列中估计进化关系”。在作为分子生物信息学基础的几乎所有序列分析中，对DNA序列进行比对以确定哪些位点具有可比性是至关重要的一步。对序列间进化关系的估计有助于指导比对，而更准确的比对有助于系统发育推断。同时比对序列和推断进化树的统计方法正在被调查、比较并在自由软件中实现。

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.