Joe Felsenstein


For my contact information and email address, see my CV.
   News:

  • Joan and I are currently (11 March 2024) sheltering at home since 2 March 2020, working mostly remotely, reachable by email. All well so far, despite one case of Covid each, and we are fully vaccinated and boosted as well.

  • Owing to the end of departmental subsidies of the fees for use of the Genome Sciences computers and IT services, as of 31 August 2023, my web sites and email addresses have changed. This page is now hosted at my own Github site, felsenst.github.io
  • I was recently awarded a 2020 Friend of Darwin Award by the National Center for Science Education. Youtube video of the online award ceremony here.

  • The Felsenstein / Kuhner lab was closed at the end of 2017. I now have a retirement office (S432) and Mary Kuhner, Jon Yamato, and Lucian Smith were given an office (S332) of their own. In 2020 Mary and Jon became associated with Sam Wasser's lab in the Biology Department, and their office in Foege was closed. I also have a desk in room 472 of the Biology Department's new Life Sciences Building, in an area with multiple student desks and desks for retired faculty members. The rooms of the old Felsenstein / Kuhner lab, S420, are now the lab of our new population genetics hire Kelley Harris.

  • I retired on October 1, 2017 and now have more time to do research on things of interest to me, and to catch up with work on PHYLIP.

  • In the issue of Nature published on 29 October 2014, they published a list of the top 100 most-cited scientific papers of all time. My 1985 bootstrap paper was #41. Overall 5 of the 100 were in phylogenetics (Saitou and Nei's 1987 paper on the Neighbor-Joining method was #20). There were also a number of bioinformatics papers, with papers on ClustalW and BLAST being #10 and #12, respectively.

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    Ufeus felsensteini
      Bruce Walsh, of the University of Arizona, has named a species of small noctuid moth found in Arizona's Santa Catalina Mountains after me. It probably eats cottonwood leaves. For the paper describing it, see here. Bruce recently told me that he named this one after me because the markings on the front wings looked like "long branches".
   Books, etc.:
  Scientific papers:
  • Links to published papers (some viewable freely) will be found in the publications list in my C.V.
  • For papers since 1990, versions will be found here, many of them being preprint versions. A PDF of a scan of my 1968 Ph.D. thesis will also be found there (in folder "thesis").
  Software:   
  • Programs written for some of my scientific papers. Click here for a page describing them, with links.
  • The PopG one-locus two-allele population-genetics simulation program is available here. It is written in Java and is free.
  • PHYLIP. the Phylogeny Inference Package, is available from its website here.
  • LAMARC. Mary Kuhner and Jon Yamato's coalescent likelihood program, is available from its website here.
  Courses:
  • Courses I have taught at the University of Washington (in each case the most recent course web page is linked to). Many have audio recordings of lectures and viewable PDFs of slides. I retired at the end of September, 2017. After that I will only teach some summer courses.
  • Summer courses I teach in, or have taught in. (Lecture projections and audio recordings are available for some of these):
    I teach in:
    • Evolutionary Quantitative Genetics Workshop. I co-founded and have co-led this with Steve Arnold of Oregon State University since 2011. Since 2017 it has been given at the Friday Harbor Laboratories of the UW on beautiful San Juan Island. For people who want to know more, here are the blog pages for the workshop. The links in the 2019 schedule there lead to pages for the lectures that have lecture projections and audio recordings of the lectures. The workshop was given in 2019 from 10-14 June. The 2020 workshop was cancelled owing to the pandemic; we had it in an online version in 2021 and in 2022.
    I have taught in:
  Videos: A page containing links to videos of some lectures I have given. In some cases PDFs are also available for the slides, which will be clearer than what you can see of them in the video.
  Disputation: CREATIONISM/INTELLIGENT DESIGN
Here are some postings by me on blogs regarding arguments by advocates of Intelligent Design or creationism:

OTHER CONTROVERSIES
          My take on the renaming of the R.A. Fisher Award

  Silliness: The Amphioxus Song web page.
A video of me singing the Amphioxus Song (a Quicktime movie) shot by Anna Malaspinas at the 2010 annual retreat of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Program of the University of California, Berkeley, which was held at the Marconi Center, Marshall, California.
Another performance at the Workshop on Molecular Evolution at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 2011, thanks to Casey Dunn.
The 2013 performance which had more wind noise, me temporarily skipping a verse, but at least no mosquitos.
The 2015 performance which had no wind noise but I still had to be reminded of verses.
A 2018 performance at a Darwin birthday celebration in the Department of Genome Sciences. Charles Laird and Kelley Harris are seated next to me.
  Cool: Some cool stuff that should be better known.
  Rants: Some rants and diatribes that Joe often comes up with. They are gradually being accumulated here.
  Old:Older stuff that is less important is linked on this web page.