Jack O'Brien Assistant Professor of Mathematics Bowdoin College Searles Science Center 202 8600 College Station Brunswick, Maine 04011 telephone: 207-844-4703

My research focuses on applications of statistics to genetics and ecology. I work largely with mixture models -- finite mixtures, Dirichlet processes, hidden Markov models -- to help scientists understand how species distributions change in time and space according to covariates. As a specialized application of this, I analyze the structure of genetic mixture within isolates of Plasmodium falciparum, the cause of most severe malaria, as part of the PF3K consortium.

• Mixture model of pottery decorations from Lake Chad Basin archeological sites reveals ancient segregation patterns. John D. O'Brien, Kathryn Lin, and Scott MacEachern. Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B. In press. (Available at arxiv.org:1511.05185)
  
• Inferring strain mixture within clinical Plasmodium falciparum isolates from whole genome sequence data. John D. O'Brien, Zamin Iqbal, Jason Wenler, and Lucas Amenga-Etego. PLoS Computational Biology. In press. (Available at arxiv.org:1505.08171)
  
• The power and pitfalls of Dirichlet-multinomial mixture models for ecological count data. John D. O'Brien, Nicholas Record, and Peter Countway. Submitted. (Available at biorxiv:045468)