Professor;
Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1986

Research and Professional Interests:

The theory and methodology of phylogenetic inference from molecular sequences and morphological data (development of algorithms and software to facilitate model-based analysis of DNA sequences; comparison of optimality criteria used to evaluate evolutionary trees; methods of combining molecular and morphological data using maximum likelihood; assessing robustness of maximum-likelihood methods to model violation; exploration and evaluation of metaheuristics useful in searching for optimal evolutionary trees).

Selected Publications:

Swofford, D. L., G. J. Olsen, P. J. Waddell, and D. M. Hillis. 1996. Phylogenetic inference. Pages 407-514 in D. M. Hillis, C. Moritz, and B. Mable (eds.) Molecular Systematics (2nd ed.), Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Massachusetts.

Maddison, D. R., D. L. Swofford, and W. P. Maddison. 1997. NEXUS: an extensible file format for systematic information. Syst. Biol. 46: 590-621.

Rogers, J. S., and D. L. Swofford. 1998. A fast method for approximating maximum likelihoods of phylogenetic trees from nucleotide sequences. Syst. Biol. 47: 77-89.

Rogers, J. S., and D. L. Swofford. 1999. Multiple local maxima for likelihoods of phylogenetic trees: a simulation study. Mol. Biol. Evol. 16: 1079-1085.

Sullivan, J., D. L. Swofford, and G. P. Naylor. 1999. The effect of taxon sampling on estimating rate heterogeneity parameters of maximum-likelihood models. Mol. Biol. Evol. 16: 1347-1356.

Poe, S., and D. L. Swofford. 1999. Taxon sampling revisited. Nature 389: 299-300.

Huelsenbeck, J. P., B. Larget, and D. L. Swofford. 2000. A compound Poisson process for relaxing the molecular clock. Genetics 154: 1879-1892.

Swofford, D. L., P. J. Waddell, J. P. Huelsenbeck, P. G. Foster, P. O. Lewis, and J. S. Rogers. 2001. Bias in phylogenetic estimation and its relevance to the choice between parsimony and likelihood methods. Syst. Biol. 50: 525-539.

Swofford, D. L. 2001. PAUP* . Phylogenetic Analysis Using Parsimony (*and Other Methods). Version 4. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Massachusetts.

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