Dr. Mark Jones

Mark Jones is a postdoc in the Life Sciences and Health group at CWI, hosted by Prof. Leen Stougie.

He obtained his PhD in computer science at Royal Holloway, University of London, under the supervision of Prof. Gregory Gutin and Prof. Anders Yeo. His thesis focused on problems in parameterized complexity, a framework for handling NP-hard problems by considering how their complexity depends on structural parameters. By developing parameterized algorithms for parameters that are small in practice, we can optimally and efficiently real-world instances of NP-hard problems. Since 2016, Mark has been applying this framework to problems in phylogenetics, in particular phylogenetic networks. Such problems are concerned with reconstructing the evolutionary history of organisms, using present-day genomic sequence data as a guide.  

Mark has previously worked at TU Delft, Royal Holloway, and Université de Montpellier.