Hi All, For our Statistical Bioinformatics Seminar next Monday, we will be hosting Professor Eric Stone from the ANU-CSIRO Centre for Genomics, Metabolomics and Bioinformatics. The seminars are held at 1:00 pm on Mondays at the Charles Perkins Centre, Level 3 Large meeting room. The format of the talk is approximately 40 minutes plus discussion. Further information can be found on the website https://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/SemConf/StatisticalBioinformatics.html Monday September 23th 2019 1:00 PM Seminar Level 3 Large Meeting Room Charles Perkins Centre Speaker: Professor Eric Stone (ANU) Title: Getting serious about graphical structures in genome sciences Abstract: Systems biology, defined broadly, is the study of how components of a biological system interact. Graphs, meanwhile, are general representations of the pairwise interactions (edges) between arbitrary components (vertices). It is no wonder, then, that graphs pervade systems biology and genome sciences in general. This talk is an attempt to lay some ground rules for making sense of them. I will focus on the ubiquitous issue of âmissing verticesâ that correspond to unmeasured components of the biological system. To do so, I will introduce a formal definition of graphs with missing vertices, and I will discuss how and why these objects are amenable to theory. Subsequently, I will discuss how theoretical results can be leveraged to make biological inference. I aim to provide a range of biological applications/illustrations spanning phylogenetics, population genetics, systems biology and beyond. While this talk will synthesise concepts from mathematics (i.e. spectral graph theory) and multivariate statistics (i.e. principal components analysis and multidimensional scaling), accessibility is not predicated on previous knowledge. About the speaker: Eric is a quantitative biologist who combines statistical methods and mathematical theory to investigate how genetic variation has shaped biological diversity. He studied Mathematics at the University of Florida and Princeton University before training in Statistics and Genetics at Stanford University. He joined the Australian National University in mid-2016 after eleven years on the faculty at North Carolina State University. He is founding Director of the ANU Biological Data Science Institute as well as Director of the ANU-CSIRO Centre for Genomics, Metabolomics and Bioinformatics. See you there!