Computing the tree of life: The Computational Molecular Evolution group at HITS

The “Scientific Computing“ group (SCO, group leader: Prof. Alexandros Stamatakis) will change its name as of January 1^st, 2019: To better reflect its main research area it is now renamed into  “Computational Molecular Evolution“ (CME).

Bioinformatician Alexandros Stamatakis joined HITS in fall 2010. Since 2012, he is also full professor for high performance computing in the life sciences at the Karlsruhe Institute of technology (KIT). Stamatakis is a “highly cited researcher” and the author of the RAxML tool that is used by evolutionary biologists around the world to infer phylogenetic trees.

At HITS, Alexandros Stamatakis established his research group “Scientific Computing”. Its work comprises software for inferring evolutionary trees, the evaluation and use of emerging parallel computer architectures, the evolution of cancer cells, and the statistical classification of gut bacteria. Members of the group have reconstructed large evolutionary trees of plants, insects and birds in international research projects. As the group´s mission is to enable research in evolutionary biology by means of accurate methods and scalable software, the name change into “Computational Molecular Evolution” better reflects its main research focus.