Claudia Solis-Lemus

Claudia Solis-Lemus is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with dual appointments in the Department of Plant Pathology within the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Her work bridges statistical methodology development with biological applications, focusing on creating computationally efficient models that maintain biological interpretability and theoretical guarantees.

Dr. Solis-Lemus earned her PhD in Statistics and MA in Mathematics, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her academic journey has positioned her at the intersection of statistics, computational biology, and evolutionary genomics.

Her research program centers on three interconnected areas: statistical phylogenomics, microbiome analysis, and the application of deep learning in biological contexts. In statistical phylogenomics, she develops novel methods to reconstruct phylogenetic networks that can account for reticulate evolutionary processes like hybridization and horizontal gene transfer. Her work in microbiome analysis focuses on creating statistical frameworks to model microbial communities as networks and use these networks to predict host phenotypes. In deep learning applications, she addresses challenges in applying neural networks to biomedical data by developing methods with statistical guarantees and improved interpretability.

Analysis of Dr. Solis-Lemus's recent publications reveals a strong emphasis on developing computationally efficient methods for analyzing complex biological networks. Her work spans from theoretical advances in phylogenetic network inference to practical software implementations for microbiome analysis. A notable trend is her focus on creating methods that balance statistical rigor with computational tractability, particularly for large-scale biological datasets. Her research increasingly integrates machine learning approaches with traditional statistical methods to address challenges in evolutionary biology and microbiome research.

Dr. Solis-Lemus has received significant recognition through competitive grants including:

• NSF CAREER Award (DEB 2144367) for "Towards Scalable and Robust Inference of Phylogenetic Networks"
• USDA Individual Hatch grant for "Enhanced interaction and network statistical models for microbiome data"
• DOE Computational Tool Development award for "Harnessing the power of big omics data"
• USDA-NIFA hatch project 1023699 for "Novel interaction and network statistical models for microbiome data"
• NSF IntBIO Collaborative Research DEB Award 2316269
• USDA NIFA award for "Unraveling The Microbial Mechanisms That Mediate Disease Resurgence In Plants"

Dr. Solis-Lemus actively mentors a diverse research group including postdoctoral researchers, PhD students, MS students, and undergraduates. Her lab is supported by multiple grants totaling millions of dollars, enabling research that spans from theoretical statistics to practical applications in agriculture and medicine. She has successfully secured funding from NSF, DOE, USDA, and industry partners, demonstrating the broad relevance of her work across multiple domains.

The Solis-Lemus Lab operates as an interdisciplinary team bringing together statisticians, biologists, computer scientists, and domain experts. The lab maintains strong collaborations with researchers across UW-Madison and nationally, particularly in plant pathology, microbiology, and evolutionary biology. They develop open-source software tools that are widely used in the scientific community, including PhyloNetworks for phylogenetic network analysis and CMiNet for microbiome network construction.