Dr. Sarah Heaps

Contact information

• Phone number:
• e-mail adress: sarah.heaps (at) newcastle.ac.uk

Work description

I completed my PhD in Statistics at Newcastle University under the supervision of Malcolm Farrow and Richard Boys. The main objective of my PhD project was the development of hidden Markov models for the space-time analysis of rainfall data within a subjective Bayesian framework. My current work, in the field of Bayesian statistical phylogenetics, is part of an ERC funded cross-disciplinary collaboration between ICaMB and the School of Mathematics & Statistics. Many commonly used statistical models for sequence evolution oversimplify the data generating mechanism, for example, by assuming that the stationary distribution of sequence characters is the same across sites and across the tree. This can lead to misleading inferences about the evolutionary relationships amongst species. Therefore the aims of my current project are (i) to develop more sophisticated and biologically informed models for sequence evolution and (ii) to investigate the problem of how to discriminate between different statistical models describing a particular alignment of data. This work will allow us to address important biological questions concerning where to root the tree of eukaryotic evolution and, more generally, the tree of life.

Sarah's publications

• Heaps SE, Boys RJ, Farrow M. Computation of marginal likelihoods with data-dependent support for latent variables. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis. (2013).
• Nakjang S, Williams TA, Heinz E, Watson AK, Foster PG, Sendra KM, Heaps SE, Hirt RP, Embley TM. Reduction and expansion in microsporidian genome evolution: new insights from comparative genomics. Genome Biol Evol. vol 5 p. 2285-303 (2013). pubmed