Alexander A. Fisher
Welcome to my website!
I’m an assistant professor of the practice in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University. Prior to joining the faculty at Duke, I completed my PhD in Biomathematics at University of California, Los Angeles advised by Marc Suchard.
Research
How quickly is an infectious pathogen’s epitope mutating? How fast is said pathogen diffusing across a geographic landscape? What factors contribute to, or otherwise augment, transmissibility?
My current research focuses on leveraging Bayesian phylogenetics to answer questions like these that lie at the interface of epidemiology, genetics and evolution. Within this framework, one is often interested in estimating thousands of highly correlated parameters that describe complex, hierarchical data generative processes. Typically, the number of parameters grows with the data. To study increasingly massive data sets, including genomic sequence and spatial coordinate data, I build scalable statistical models together with scalable inference machinery and implement my work in the popular open source Bayesian Evolutionary Analysis Sampling Trees (BEAST) software package. Current methodologies of interest include Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, Bayesian variable selection via shrinkage priors and dynamic programming algorithms.
Click here to see a list of publications.
Teaching
Click an icon or semester below to go to one of my course websites.
Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
