Poly Hannah da Silva

I'm an Associate Research Scientist* in the Department of Statistics and the Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics at Columbia University. My primary areas of interest include combinatorial probability, discrete mathematics, graph theory, and algorithms with their applications in population genetics, genomics, cancer, and phylogeny reconstruction. I received my Ph.D. in Mathematics at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil, under the supervision of Prof. David Sankoff and Prof. Max Souza, and a part of my doctoral research was completed at University of Ottawa, Canada.

My current research focuses on the development of statistical and probabilistic methods to understand various aspects of cancer and molecular evolution. This involves developments in the theory of birth-death immigration processes with clonal selection, models incorporating time-varying mutation rates for analyzing biologically-related data, evolutionary dynamics in structured populations, as well as comparative genomics and phylogenetics to investigate cancer evolution.