Regular biography
Dr. Anne R. Francis is a distinguished researcher in the fields of mathematical biology, computational biology, and evolutionary genetics. Her work focuses on the mathematical modeling of evolutionary processes, particularly in bacterial genomes, and the development of algebraic and combinatorial tools to understand genome evolution, gene rearrangements, and phylogenetic networks. She has made significant contributions to the study of genome rearrangements, including the development of algebraic frameworks for double-cut-and-join (DCJ) operations and the analysis of inversion processes in bacterial genomes. Dr. Francis has also explored the identifiability of phylogenetic networks and the properties of tree-based networks, which are essential for understanding reticulate evolution. Her research has been published in leading journals such as *Journal of Mathematical Biology*, *Bulletin of Mathematical Biology*, *Journal of Theoretical Biology*, and *Mathematical Biosciences*. In addition to her theoretical work, she has collaborated on applied projects, including the study of electron transport in TiO2 and the evolution of gene clusters in bacterial genomes. Dr. Francis is a professor at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where she continues to advance the interdisciplinary study of biology and mathematics.