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Frederick (Erick) Matsen wants to advance analytical approaches to solve the hardest problems at the intersection of evolutionary biology and immunology/virology. Matsen and his team are seeking to scale methodologies to large and rich modern data sets, such as sequencing data from a large population of viruses, to better understand fundamental evolutionary processes. The team has thus far found a new foundation for Bayesian phylogenetics to enable such scaling. Matsen’s long-term goal is to enable richer evolutionary models to be used in phylogenetic analysis, such as mechanistically-informed statistical models of antibody somatic hypermutation, as well as models of protein fitness.