Robust Procedures to Model Biological Processes in Marine Ecology and Molecular Evolution

My research will focus on developing robust statistical procedures for modelling biological processes with particular interest in molecular evolution and marine ecology. This research is motivated by close collaboration with researchers at Dalhousie in both these areas where the important scientific questions are formulated. In both these settings, the standard statistical models are approximations to reality and the data itself can be quite noisy and subject to outliers. Both factors indicate a strong need for procedures which work well for neighbourhoods of the putative model and are not unduly influenced by outlying observations, namely robust procedures.