NIMBioS Welcomes Interim Director

Welcome to NIMBioS!

Ever since 2008, NIMBioS has been a home for innovative work across a wide variety of domains, from mathematics to biology, from high performance computing to spatial analysis. 

Our workshops, tutorials, working groups, postdoc program, and other activities have provided connections and training for hundreds of colleagues. Research fostered here has touched millions of lives and is still continuing. 

Over summer and early fall 2025, we are considering what our future should be. We are grateful for ongoing support from the College of Arts & Sciences and throughout the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, more generally, as well as our many local, state, federal, and international partners, funders, and collaborators. 

We will be reaching out to you for ideas and suggestions moving forward, but if you have some already, please connect with us at contact@nimbios.org.
Please reach out to us if you have any questions!

Meet the Director

Brian O’Meara is the interim director of NIMBioS and a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Brian got his BA in biology at Harvard University (working in the beetle lab of Brian Farrell) and his Ph.D. in Population Biology at the University of California, Davis, working in the labs of Mike Sanderson (botany and phylogenetic methods), Phil Ward (ant systematics and evolution), and Michael Turelli (population genetics). He then had a postdoc at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), with mentor Todd Vision (genome evolution). Support from the US National Science Foundation was essential at all stages.

Brian was hired as an assistant professor at UT Knoxville in one of the faculty lines associated with the start of NIMBioS, which further strengthened the mathematical biology group here. He has mentored many NIMBioS postdocs and served as an associate director for postdocs. He also participated in and organized various NIMBioS tutorials and working groups.

Brian’s research work focuses on development and use of phylogenetic methods. These include work on birth-death models for speciation and extinction, hidden Markov models for trait evolution, and approximate likelihood models for species delimitation, usually implemented in R for ease of use. His service work includes work on actionable codes of conduct and ethics for US-based evolution societies, other work within the Society of Systematic Biology, and years as an associate head in EEB. His teaching includes macroevolution, evolution for graduate students, and phylogenetic methods.

Mission

Our mission is to foster the growth of transdisciplinary approaches within mathematics and biology

Contact

contact@nimbios.org

1122 Volunteer Blvd, Claxton 114
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-3410

Brian O'Meara, Interim Director

NIMBioS

From 2008 until early 2021, NIMBioS was supported by the National Science Foundation through NSF Award #DBI-1300426, with additional support from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  Any options, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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