The evolution of a species is driven by a few different forces, one of which is mutations to the genome. The fitness effects of various mutations may be beneficial, neutral, or deleterious to the species; by considering all possible mutations that can occur, the distribution of fitness effects (DFE) can be constructed. As a species adapts, beneficial mutations are more likely to fix within a population. How does this affect the shape of the DFE? Moreover, does the DFE change dynamically as organisms slowly become better adapted to their environment? 

(Recently published and available here) 

Another main force that drives evolution is natural selection and a main goal in evolutionary biology is to explore and quantify its effects. One relatively new way to do this is by analyzing the changes in allele frequencies, although this is still quite difficult due to the inherent stochasticity. We're developing a new permutation approach to detect genome-wide selection in allele frequency time series in hopes of being able to estimate parameters relating to the sign and strength of autocorrelation in empirical data.