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Michael Cummings


Picture
Professor
Director of Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Contact
Email: mike@umiacs.umd.edu
Office Phone: 301.405.9903
Fax: 301.314.1341
Office Address: 3108 Biomolecular Sciences Building

Teaching
  • BSCI471 Molecular Evolution
  • BIOL671 Molecular Evolution
  • CBMG688Y Bioinformatics and Genomics

Graduate Program Affiliations
  • BISI - Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, & Genomics (CBBG)
  • BISI - Behavior, Ecology, Evolution, & Systematics (BEES)

Research Interests
Our research is in the areas of bioinformatics, computational biology and molecular evolutionary genetics, and includes examination of patterns and processes of sequence evolution to understand molecular evolutionary mechanisms that bring about biological change. The basis for much of the research is comparative and includes several levels of biological organization. In addition to answering specific biological questions, a substantial portion of the research has focused on experimental design and data analysis methods, and software development. 
Recent Publications
  • Goodheart J, Bleidißel S, Schillo D, Strong EE, Ayres DL, Priesfeld G, Collins AG, Cummings MP, Wagele H. (2018) Comparative morphology and evolution of the cnidosac in Cladobranchia (Gastropoda: Heterobranchia: Nudibranchia). Front Zool 15:43.
  • Ayres DL, Cummings MP. (2018) Rerooting trees increases opportunities for concurrent computation and results in markedly improved performance for phylogenetic inference. 2018 IEEE 32nd International Parallel and Distributed Processing Workshops (IPDPSW) pg. 247–256.
  • Goodheart J, Bazinet AL, Valdes A, Collins AG, Cummings MP. (2017) Prey preference follows phylogeny: evolutionary dietary patterns within the marine gastropod group Cladobranchia (Gastropoda: Heterobranchia: Nudibranchia). BMC Evol Biol 17:221.
  • Agrawal S, Moser KA, Morton L, Cummings MP, Parihar A, Dwivedi A, Shetty AC, Drabek E, Jacob CG, Henrich PP, Parobek, CM, Jongsakul K, Huy R, Spring MD, Lanteri CA, Chaorattanakawee S, Lon C, Fukuda MM, Saunders DL, Fidock DA, Lin JT Juliano JJ, Plowe CV, Silva JC, Takala- Harrison S. (2017) Association of a novel mutation in the Plasmodium falciparum chloroquine resistance transporter is associated with piperaquine resistance. J Infect Dis 216(4):468–476.
  • Bazinet AL, Mitter KT, Davis, DR, van Nieukeren EJ, Cummings MP, Mitter C. (2017) Phylotranscriptomics resolves ancient divergences in the Lepidoptera. Syst Entomol 42:305–316.
  • Huson DH, Tappu R, Bazinet AL, Xie C, Cummings MP, Nieselt K, Williams R. (2017) Fast and simple protein-alignment-guided assembly of orthologous gene families from microbiome sequencing reads Microbiome 5:11.
  • Ayres DL, Cummings MP. (2017) Configuring concurrent computation of phylogenetic partial likelihoods: accelerating analyses using the BEAGLE Library. In: Ibrahim S, Choo KK, Yan Z, Pedrycz W (eds) Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing. ICA3PP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 10393:533–547.
  • Mitter C, Davis DR, Cummings MP. (2017) Phylogeny and evolution of Lepidoptera. Annu Rev Entomol 62:265–283.
  • Ayres DL, Cummings MP. (2017) Heterogeneous hardware support in BEAGLE, a high-performance computing library for statistical phylogenetics, in 46th International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops (ICPPW 2017) pg. 23–32.
  • Regier JC, Mitter C, Mitter KT, Cummings MP, Bazinet AL, Hallwachs W, Janzen DH, Zwick A. (2017) Further progress on the phylogeny of Noctuoidea (Insecta: Lepidoptera) using an expanded gene sample. Syst Entomol 42:82–93.
  • Bazinet AL, Cummings MP. (2016) Subdividing long-running analyses into short, fixed-length BOINC workunits. J Grid Computing 14:429–441.
  • Sohn J-C, Regier J, Mitter C, Adamski D, Landry J-F, Heikkila M, Park K-T, Harrison T, Mitter K, Zwick A, Kawahara A, Cho S, Cummings MP, Schmitz P. (2016) Phylogeny and feeding trait evolution of the mega-diverse Gelechioidea (Lepidoptera: Obtectomera): new insight from 19 nuclear genes. Syst Entomol 41:112–132.

Education
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1992. Molecular evolution, bioinformatics, computational biology.
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