Education

Ph.D., Uppsala University, Sweden
B.S., University of Asmara, Eritrea

Courses Taught

Bio 110 – Biological Communities, Evolution and Biodiversity
BIO 471 – Cellular & Molecular Biology 
BIO 416 – Microbial Origins Research 
SBIO 491N – Microbial Diversity and Evolution
SBIO 491 – Undergraduate research 

Research Interests

My lab implements the basic principles of evolution to study the diversity, origin and relationships of medical and nonmedical microbes. I am also fascinated by interdisciplinary research approaches in answering challenging questions that affect our everyday life. I am particularly interested in integrating bioinformatics/phylogenetics with mathematical modeling in order to understand the evolution and epidemics of infectious diseases 

Publications

Tekle Y. I., Anderson o. Roger, †Lecky A., †Kelly S. D. A New Freshwater Amoeba: Cochliopodium pentatrifurcatum n. sp. (Amoebozoa, Amorphea). In press. Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology

Tekle, Y.I., Nielsen KM., Liu J., Pettigrew M., Meyers LA., Townsend JP., Galvani AP. 2012. Controlling nosocomial methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus through directed vaccination, treatment, and evolutionary response. PLoS One 7,12/e50688 

Ndeffo Mbah M.L., Liu J., Bauch C.T., Tekel Y.I., Medlock J., Meyers L.A., Galvani A.P. 2012. The Impact of Imitation on Vaccination Behavior in Social Contact. PLoS Comput Biol 8(4): e1002469. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002469

Townsend J.P., Su Z., Tekle, Y.I. 2012. Phylogenetic signal and noise: Predicting the power of a dataset to resolve phylogeny. Syst Biol. doi: 10.1093/sysbio/sys036

Liu J., Kochin B.F., Tekle, Y.I., Galvani A.P. 2011. Epidemiological game-theory dynamics of chickenpox vaccination in the USA and Israel. J. R. Soc. Interface 7, 9 66 68-76 

Tekle, Y. I., Grant J., †Kovner, A., Townsend J., Katz, L. 2010. Identification of new molecular markers for assembling the eukaryotic tree of life. Mol. Phylogenet. Evol. (), doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2010.03.010

Tekle, Y. I., Parfrey L.W., Katz L.A. 2009. Molecular Data are Transforming Hypotheses on the Origin and Diversification of Eukaryotes. BioScience 59: 471–481