Graduate Students

  • Olivia Reiter: MSc (Coadvised by Ben Ashby)

  • Simon Gamboa Levi: PhD (Coadvised by Leithen M’Gonigle)

  • Amin Afshari: PhD (Coadvised by Leithen M’Gonigle)

  • Yexuan Song: PhD (Coadvised by Caroline Colijn)

Yexuan Song

I am interested in phylogenetics. In particular Ancestral State Reconstruction methods which are widely used in phylogenetics for identifying the character states of evolutionary ancestors. I am also interested in using mathematical models of infectious diseases to study how diseases spread.





  • Mahdi Salehzadeh: PhD (Coadvised by John Stockie)

Mahdi’s Homepage

Mahdi Salehzadeh


I have a wide range of research interests that are motivated by biological applications. My current work involves using epidemiology and evolutionary approaches to examine bark beetle infestations. I’m interested in exploring multi-scale questions that occur in a variety of fields, broadly speaking falling under the following categories:

  1. Investigating the dynamics within the host (tree) using computational fluid dynamics approaches.
  2. Creating a brand-new model to depict an outbreak of the bark beetle while refining the presumptions made in earlier literature studies. and evaluating the severity of many parameters to limit the outbreak.
  3. Examining issues brought up in the study of evolution, such as local adaptation.



Undergraduates

  • Luka Yuki: (USRA 2025)



## Alumni:

  • Amy Langdon: PDF (Cohosted by Caroline Colijn)

  • Siavash Riazi: PDF (Cohosted by Caroline Colijn)

  • Rebeccah Hall: MSc (2022-2024) Now a PhD student with Vincent Clavez and Matt Osmond in Brest France

  • Ananaga Bajgai: (USRA 2023, 2024)

  • Oliver Fujiki: (USRA 2022, MSc 2023-2024)

  • Erwan Hardy: (Visiting Scholar, April-July 2025)