David Swofford, PhD
Research Scientist, Senior
"When I began working in computational phylogenetics in the early 1980s, few people imagined how central the role of evolutionary trees would be for our understanding of genome organization, function, and evolution."David Swofford works on the theory and methodology of phylogenetic inference. He spends most of his research time developing and implementing algorithms for estimating evolutionary trees using model-based analyses of DNA and amino-acid sequences. Among other software development efforts, he is the author of the widely used PAUP* program. Current and recent research efforts include the comparison of optimality criteria used to evaluate evolutionary trees, the exploration of robustness of model-based methods to model violation, and assessment of Markov chain Monte Carlo convergence in Bayesian phylogenetic inference.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1986. Before coming to Duke in the fall of 2007, he was the Francis Eppes Professor of Biological Science at Florida State University. He received the first-ever President's Award for Excellence in Systematics from the Society of Systematic Biology in 1998.
Contact Information
David Swofford, PhD
Phone: 919-613-7458
david.swofford@ddu
Physical Address:
366 BioSci
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708
Postal Address:
Postal Address:
Box 90338
Center for Evolutionary Genomics
Durham, NC 27708-0338