Vu Dinh joined as a postdoc in our group at the new year. Vu came to us from Purdue, where he got his PhD working in statistics and computational biology. He is especially interested in machine learning theory.

Vu has already been highly productive during his short time here. He has proven some theoretical results describing the shape of the phylogenetic likelihood function, and used these to prove convergence of our likelihood function approximation scheme. He has also made significant progress on effective sample size guarantees for online phylogenetic SMC. Stay tuned for upcoming arXiv submissions, and for other nice work from Vu!