Professor Eric Stone

I am a quantitative biologist who combines statistical methods and mathematical theory to investigate how genetic variation has shaped biological diversity. Toward that end, I study aspects of the evolutionary process, including the landscape of mutational events that give rise to genetic variation, the genetic basis of fitness-related traits, and the influence of selection and drift on patterns of genetic variation. These pursuits often stimulate the development of new statistical and computational methods, and I seek to make the most useful of these available as user-friendly tools. I value methodology as an essential lens through which biology may be perceived, but I also appreciate its ability to distort the truth. This motivates my use of mathematics to dissect popular methods that we as a community use to make biological inference.