Peter Beerli

Peter Beerli is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Scientific Computing at Florida State University (FSU). He specializes in computational evolutionary biology, population genetics, and phylogenetics, developing software tools such as MIGRATE to analyze genetic data. His research focuses on coalescent theory, Bayesian inference, and model selection.

Education: PhD in Zoology from the University of Zurich (1994), followed by postdoctoral work with Joseph Felsenstein at the University of Washington. His career spans computational biology, starting from evolutionary studies in amphibians to software development for population genetic analysis.

Research highlights include the fractional coalescent model (f-coalescent), divergence time estimation, and integrating epidemiological data with phylogenetics. He teaches courses in algorithms, scientific computing, and population genetics. His lab members include Haleh Ashki, Somayeh Mashayekhi, and Kyle Shaw, among others.

Beerli's work emphasizes applying mathematical and computational methods to address biological questions, with contributions to malaria parasite evolution, whale population studies, and pathogen transmission modeling. His software MIGRATE is widely used for inferring migration rates and population sizes.