Dr. Marc Suchard is helping to develop the nascent field of evolutionary medicine. This field harnesses the power of methods and theory from evolutionary biology to advance our understanding of human disease processes. Just as phylogenetic approaches have stimulated the field of evolution at large, they posses the potential to revolutionize evolutionary medicine, particularly in the study of rapidly evolving pathogens. To bridge the gap between phylogenetics and human-pathogen biology, Dr. Suchard's interests focus on the development of novel reconstruction methods drawing heavily on statistical, mathematical and computation techniques. Some of his current projects involve jointly estimating alignments and phylogenies from molecular sequence data and mapping recombination hot-spots in the HIV genome.