RESCHEDULED - Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Kevin Leder

Prof. Kevin Leder

Professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department
University of Minnesota

About the lecture:

Prof. Leder will first give an overview of some of the research projects he has worked on during his academic career. This will include a brief discussion of his work in rare event simulation, and a discussion of his work in cancer therapy including treatment optimization, and mathematical models of drug resistance and cancer initiation. He will next talk in greater depth about his recent work on the site frequency spectrum (SFS). The SFS is a statistic that can be used to detect the presence of selection in evolving populations. Prof. Leder will discuss recent work where we constructed new estimators of the mutation rate based on observations of the SFS.
 

Bio:

Kevin Leder joined the University of Minnesota in 2011. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health for two years with Franziska Michor, and a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University for one year working with Jose Blanchet. He received his PhD in 2008 from Brown University in Applied Mathematics under the supervision of Paul Dupuis and Hui Wang. His initial research work was on simulation of rare events in queueing networks and random walks, but he has since worked extensively on mathematical modeling of cancer initiation and treatment. Professor Leder was promoted to full professor in Fall 2023.