Lars Arvestad

Lars Arvestad is a Senior Lecturer at Stockholm University's Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science. His research focuses on computational biology problems in evolution and comparative genomics, with significant contributions to bioinformatics tool development for genome assembly and phylogenetic analysis. He teaches courses in programming techniques for mathematicians, database technology, and software engineering.

• Academic Appointments: Senior Lecturer in Mathematics (2013-present)
• Research Focus: Computational modeling of biological systems, particularly in evolutionary genomics and genome assembly challenges

His work includes creating BESST for efficient genome scaffolding, VMCMC for Bayesian phylogeny analysis, and Fastphylo for accelerated phylogenetic tree construction. Key technical innovations involve handling PE-contamination in mate-pair libraries and developing automated burn-in estimation for MCMC methods.

Recent publications demonstrate expertise in integrating mathematical modeling with biological data analysis, particularly in solving practical challenges in next-generation sequencing data processing. The research group Computational Mathematics at Stockholm University develops methods applicable across molecular to planetary scale systems.