The center for computational evolutionary morphometry (CCEM) at the University of Copenhagen brings together leading experts from evolutionary biology, computer science and mathematical modelling to take further Darwin’s quest for knowledge on change of animal and human morphology over time with modern mathematical and computational tools. We wish to gain phylogenetic information from observed morphological evolution and push forward stochastic shape analysis methodology enabling computation and statistical inference in stochastic shape models.

By way of this cross-disciplinary collaboration that combines full shape analysis, stochastic and statistical shape modelling and phylogenetic inference, we aim to identify evolutionary trends across the Tree of Life, revealing new patterns of biodiversity, lineage and kinships between species.

News

• June 2022: CCEM hosted the Workshop on Stochastic Morphometrics.
• April 2022: Patrick Hartvigsen and Rasmus Nielsen defended their Msc thesis “Images segmentation of butterfly wings using U-Net: Transforming butterfly wings into SDFs for shape analysis“.

Positions

We currently have open positions for CCEM hosted projects:

• PhD fellowship in Computational Phylogenetics at the GLOBE Institute
• PhD Project in stochastic modelling of shape evolution for phylogenetic analysis

Funding

The centre is supported by the Villum Foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, and the UCPH Strategy funds for interdisciplinary research.