**Virtual only**

Learning the Ocean’s Microbial Ecology using Statistical Mixture Models

Presented by Assistant Professor Sangwon Hyun, Department of Statistics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Wednesday, Oct 4 2023
4:00 PM-5:00 PM ET
**Virtual only**
Webex Meeting Link

Although microscopic, phytoplankton in the ocean are extremely important to all of life and are together responsible for as much photosynthesis as all plants on land combined. Oceanographers now routinely collect single cell data in real-time while onboard a moving ship, which yields high-resolution information about the distribution of phytoplankton across thousands of kilometers. I present new statistical methods designed to estimate time-varying phytoplankton sub-populations from flow cytometry data while simultaneously identifying the specific environmental drivers. We apply this model to data from numerous oceanographic ships deployed in the North Pacific ocean and learn new insights about the relationship between marine microbial populations and environmental factors.

Speaker Bio:

Sangwon Hyun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests include oceanographic data analysis, epidemiological modeling/forecasting, changepoint detection, and selective inference. More generally, he develops statistical tools for large complex data in real-world scientific applications. Before his current position, Hyun was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, advised by Jacob Bien. He received his PhD in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was advised by Max G'Sell and Ryan Tibshirani.