Jay Taylor

$School ofMathematical and Statistical Sciences$

Bee Orchid (Ophrys apifera)
Burgess Field, Oxford

Melanostoma scalare (hoverfly)
infected by Entomophthora muscae s.l.
Cherwell River, Oxford

Jay Taylor
Assistant Professor
School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
Arizona State University
Office: PSA 447
Phone: 480-965-2641
e-mail: jtaylor@math.asu.edu
URL:http://math.asu.edu/~jtaylor

RESEARCH

I am broadly interested in understanding the different ways in which environmental variation influences adaptive evolution. Although one might expect that a beneficial mutation will simply rise in frequency until it has become fixed in a population, there are several processes that can cause the mean fitness of a population to decline. One of these is random variation in individual survival and reproductive success. For example, a genotype that is advantageous because it confers increased resistance to a disease could be lost from a population by chance if most of the individuals harboring that mutation are killed by a severe storm. Another complication is that the fitness of some genotypes depends on environmental conditions that fluctuate over time and space. Thus the fate of a mutation that is beneficial in wet years but disadvantageous during droughts will be determined in part by the distribution of rainfall across years and regions.

Because adaptation can be influenced by a variety of processes, mathematical models are needed both to develop a qualitative understanding of how populations evolve and to formulate efficient statistical tools for the analysis of DNA sequence data. My work focuses mainly on the analysis of stochastic population genetical models, with a particular emphasis on approximation and convergence of stochastic processes with multiple time scales, and on coalescent processes. Some specific areas of interest are: