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

11. December 2018

The “Scientific Computing“ group (SCO, group leader: Prof. Alexandros Stamatakis) will change its name as of January 1st, 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.

About HITS

HITS, the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, was established in 2010 by physicist and SAP co-founder Klaus Tschira (1940-2015) and the Klaus Tschira Foundation as a private, non-profit research institute. HITS conducts basic research in the natural, mathematical, and computer sciences. Major research directions include complex simulations across scales, making sense of data, and enabling science via computational research. Application areas range from molecular biology to astrophysics. An essential characteristic of the Institute is interdisciplinarity, implemented in numerous cross-group and cross-disciplinary projects. The base funding of HITS is provided by the Klaus Tschira Foundation.

Switch to the German homepage or stay on this page