Joseph Walker to join the Department of Biological Sciences in 2021
Joseph Walker will be joining the Department of Biological Sciences as Assistant Professor, Computational Biology, in Fall 2021. He holds a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Michigan and is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge. Dr. Walker’s research compares large genomic datasets across species in order to identify historical processes that occurred millions of years ago. By inferring these processes, he hopes to further our understanding of how species are related to each other, why traits are unevenly distributed across the tree of life, and what genes are associated with specific adaptations. Dr. Walker aims to create fast, memory efficient, and biologically informed procedures that help ease the burden on computing infrastructure required by such large scale sequencing projects.