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MathBio Seminar

Monday, September 28, 2015 - 4:00pm

Peter Ralph

University of Southern California

Location

University of Pennsylvania

318 Carolyn Lynch Lab

Most species are distributed across geography, and so can develop regional differences in different parts of the range. These may often be as a result of natural selection, and the geographic scale on which different solutions to evolutionary problems can appear -- the spatial resolution of adaptation -- is determined by a balance between migration, selection, and availability of genetic variation. I will describe some recent work to develop appropriate stochastic models for this problem, as well as progress using georeferenced whole genomes to fit a geographically explicit population model. A recurrent theme is the use of diffusion theory to describe the spatial motion of lineages.