We are a small group of computational biologists at Louisiana State University (LSU) studying the evolutionary origins of biodiversity. Thanks for visiting our online headquarters.
May 2026: Team size++! We are ecstatic to have Clementine Yan, who flew all the way from New Zealand to do a PhD with us, here at LSU. (And this time there was no misplacement of her passport by the NZ post, woohoo!) Welcome, Clementine!
April 2026: Our most senior PhD student, Sana Raza, has just successfully (and strongly!) completed her first PhD semester at LSU. She says her goal for the Summer is to develop her first science project!
Research in the lab focuses on the large-scale (phylogenetic) mechanisms and implications of speciation, the process by which entirely new living species are born. Rather than crossing or genetically manipulating small plants and animals, our team learns from broad evolutionary patterns — in genes and traits — across species, in both time and space.
Our approach is interdisciplinary: We take our questions, hypotheses and data from biology, and drawing from statistics and computer science we then create the necessary software for analytical work. Although scripting and programming is our bread and butter, we believe useful computational biology must be grounded in deep biological scholarship and built on close partnerships with empiricists.
Under construction.
Under construction.
Under construction.
1. Mendes, F. K., Bouckaert, R., Carvalho, L. M., Drummond, A. J. How to validate a Bayesian evolutionary model. Systematic Biology 74, 1 (2025)
2. Mendes, F. K., Landis, M. J.. PhyloJunction: a computational framework for simulating, developing, and teaching evolutionary models. Systematic Biology 74, 1 (2025)
3. Zhang, R., Drummond, A. J., Mendes, F. K.*. Fast Bayesian inference of phylogenies from multiple continuous characters. Systematic Biology 73, 1 (2024)
4. Ogilvie, H. W., Mendes, F. K.*, Vaughan, T. G., Matzke, N. J., Stadler, T., Welch, D., Drummond, A. J. Novel integrative modeling of molecules and morphology across evolutionary timescales. Systematic Biology 71, 1 (2018)
5. Mendes, F. K., Fuentes-González, J. A., Schraiber, J., Hahn, M. W. A multispecies coalescent model for quantitative traits. eLife 7, e36482 (2018)
6. Mendes, F. K., Hahn, M. W. Why concatenation fails near the anomaly zone. Systematic Biology 67, 1 (2018)
Interested in joining us? Please reach out at fmendes [at] lsu.edu
