Joel Sjöstrand

I am a Ph.D. student in computational biology at SciLifeLab Stockholm, a joint resource centre for biomedical research shared between Stockholm University (SU), the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), and the Karolinska Institute (KI). SciLifeLab Stockholm is located on KI's campus in Solna, just northwest of Stockholm's city centre.

I specialise in the field of phylogenetics, that is, I try to figure out "evolutionary histories". Usually, this involves finding out how species are related. However, in my case it is actually more often about inferring how a set of related genes have evolved from a single ancestral gene, something that could be depicted as a gene tree growing inside a species tree. The information that one is endowed with is usually the biological sequences of the genes at the present day, i.e., at the leaves. Of course, trying to deduce both trees at the same time constitutes a difficult task.

The technically inclined might want to know that me and my collaborators mostly focus on creating generative models of species and gene evolution, the latter through duplications, losses and sometimes horizontal/lateral gene tranfer events. We typically employ probabilistic Bayesian frameworks using e.g. MCMC.

My supervisor is professor Jens Lagergren, and other collegues with whom I work closely include Lars Arvestad and Bengt Sennblad.

Where I'm employed: