MSU scientist turns from lizards and scat to developing tool for managing pandemics

By Montana State University
3/13/2019

As a college freshman, Alex Washburne already had his dream job: capturing lizards in the arid grasslands of New Mexico. He later went on to study snails, analyze stock prices for a hedge fund and collect scat for a major elk study around the Rockies.

But it wasn’t until he crashed his rear-wheel drive truck for the seventh time while pulling a mobile lab through the mountains that he knew what he really wanted to do. Parked on the side of the road, his dog Jack by his side, Washburne said, “I realized my time would be better spent doing math than collecting elk poop.”

Now a research scientist in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Montana State University, Washburne and his collaborators from MSU, Duke University and the University of California San Diego developed a novel mathematical tool to better understand disease and manage pandemics. They explained it in February in Ecological Monographs, a scientific journal of the Ecological Society of America. The paper, on which Washburne is lead author, is titled “Phylofactorization: A Graph Partitioning Algorithm to Identify Phylogenetic Scales of Ecological Data.” The full text is online at https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecm.1353.

Read more here: http://www.montana.edu/news/18495/msu-scientist-turns-from-lizards-and-scat-to-developing-tool-for-managing-pandemics