Public Outreach

Festival of Plants: This year at the festival of plants I helped introduce the public to the world of the plant cell.

Night at the botanic gardens: This is done through the Cambridge University Botanic Gardens. I’ve discussed the story of how the pitcher plant genus Nepenthes received its name. This marks one of the great examples of how nerdy botanists can be. In short it is named after the potion Nepenthe, which Helen of Troy took to help her forget about the loss of the people she loved. Considering how cool the Nepenthes are, botanists decided to name the plant after the potion, since seeing them would remove everyone’s sorrows. The most recent time involved discussing the important role plants play in conservation. I specifically discussed the story of Erica verticillata a heather that went extinct in the wild but is slowly being brought back thanks to clippings found in Botanic gardens.

Scientific Outreach/Service

Committee Member: Currently I sit on the computing committee at the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge.

Software development: I am one of the lead developers of Phyx: Phylogenetic tools for Unix. The software consists of 40 actively maintained C++ programs, to clean, analyze, and simulate phylogenetic and phylogenomic data. I have also developed and/or help maintain the perl program Maximum Gene Wise Edge Calculator (MGWE), and the python program Phylogenetic Analyses Into Lineages (PHAIL), SortADate, and PyPHLAWD. All these programs are open source and available on my Github.

Manuscript Reviewer: Systematic Biology, Bioinformatics, New Phytologist, Molecular Biology and Evolution, BMC Genomics, Evolutionary Bioinformatics, Genome Biology and Evolution, APPS, Nordic Journal of Botany, PeerJ, Plant Systematics, Genes, Journal of Systematics and Evolution.