Joe Felsenstein

Joseph "Joe" Felsenstein is Professor in the Departments of Genome Sciences and Biology and Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is best known for his work on phylogenetic inference, and is the author of Inferring Phylogenies, and principal author and distributor of the package of phylogenetic inference programs called PHYLIP. Closely related to his work on phylogenetic inference is his introduction of methods for making statistically independent comparisons using phylogenies (Felsenstein, 1985).

Joe did his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he did undergraduate research under James F. Crow. He then did doctoral work under Richard Lewontin in the 1960s, when he was at the University of Chicago, and did a postdoc at the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh prior to becoming faculty at the University of Washington.

In addition to his work in phylogenetics, he is also noted for his work in theoretical population genetics, including studies on selection, migration, linkage, speciation, and the coalescent.

Books

 * Felsenstein, J., and B. Taylor, eds. 1973. A Bibliography of Theoretical Population Genetics. 	U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Technical Information Center, Oak Ridge, Tenn.
 * Felsenstein, J. 2004. Inferring Phylogenies. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Mass.
 * Felsenstein, J. 2005. Theoretical Evolutionary Genetics (free ebook)

Selected papers

 * Felsenstein, J. 1973. Maximum likelihood and minimum-steps methods for estimating evolutionary trees from data on discrete characters. Systematic Zoology 22:240-249.
 * Felsenstein, J. 1982. Numerical methods for inferring evolutionary trees. Quarterly Review of Biology 57:379-404.
 * Felsenstein, J. 1985. Phylogenies and the comparative method. American Naturalist 125:1-15.
 * Felsenstein, J. 1988. Phylogenies from molecular sequences: inference and reliability. Annual Review of Genetics 22:521-565.

Trivia
He is the older brother of early personal computer designer Lee Felsenstein. He was a Red Diaper Baby (child of CPUSA members) and was named after Joseph Stalin.