Rutger Vos Postdoctoral Fellow Department of Zoology University of British Columbia 6270 University Blvd. Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4 rvos [at] interchange.ubc.ca PhD Simon Fraser University (2006) MSc University of Amsterdam (2000) Link to my home page

Research Interests

Phylogenetics is not only interesting in and of itself because it gives a picture of the pattern of evolutionary history, but also as a tool biologists can use to characterize the underlying evolutionary process. I am interested in methods of phylogenetic inference, in developing new methods and in making current methods more accessible through the development of new software. As a biologist I am particularly interested in applying these methods to the reconstruction of the history of the Primates, the Order to which we belong.

• Vos, R. A., In press. Accelerated Metropolis-Hastings coupled Markov chain Monte Carlo burn-in by iterative jackknifing. Systematic Biology.
• O. R. P. Bininda-Emonds, M. Cardillo, K. E. Jones, R. D. E. MacPhee, R. M. D. Beck, R. Grenyer, S. A. Price, R. A. Vos, J. L. Gittleman and A. Purvis, 2007. The delayed rise of present-day mammals. Nature 446: 507-512.
• E. J. de Vries, R. A. Vos, G. Jacobs, and J. A. J. Breeuwer, 2006. Western flower thrips (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) preference for thrips-damaged leaves over fresh leaves enables uptake of symbiotic gut bacteria. European Journal of Entomology 103: 779-786.
• T. Gernhard, D. Ford, R. A. Vos and M. Steel, 2006. Estimating the relative order of speciation or coalescence events on a given phylogeny. Evolutionary Bioinformatics Online 2: 309-317.
• Vos, R. A. and A. Ø. Mooers, 2004. Reconstructing divergence times for supertrees: a molecular approach. In: O. R. P. Bininda-Emonds (Ed.), Phylogenetic supertrees: Combining information to reveal the Tree of Life. pp 281-299. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
• Vos, R. A. 2003. Accelerated likelihood surface exploration: The likelihood ratchet. Systematic Biology 52: 368-373.
• Rundle, H. D., F. Breden, C. Griswold, A. Ø. Mooers, R. A. Vos, and J. Whitton. 2001. Hybridization without Guilt: Gene Flow and the Biological Species Concept. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 14: 868-869.