Lecturer
Ōwheo Building, 2.22
Email lena.collienne@otago.ac.nz
Lena joined the School of Computing as a lecturer in April 2026.
She received her BSc and MSc in Biomathematics from the University of Greifswald in Germany. For her doctoral studies she moved to Dunedin and received her PhD in Computer Science at Otago in 2022, where she worked on the mathematics and algorithms for comparing evolutionary trees.
Before returning to Otago, she spent three years as a postdoc at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle (USA).
Her research interests are in mathematical and computational phylogenetics. Her current projects focus on designing machine learning models based on the structure of phylogenetic data and evolutionary processes. Using these tools, she aims to understand what neural networks can actually learn in this area and where they can be useful in phylogenetic analyses.
Refer to Lena's personal website for more information
Publications
Collienne, L. (2021). Spaces of phylogenetic time trees (PhD). University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10523/12606 Awarded Doctoral Degree
Collienne, L., Elmes, K., Fischer, M., Bryant, D., & Gavryushkin, A. (2021). Discrete coalescent trees. Journal of Mathematical Biology, 83, 60. doi: 10.1007/s00285-021-01685-0 Journal - Research Article
Collienne, L., & Gavryushkin, A. (2021). Computing nearest neighbour interchange distances between ranked phylogenetic trees. Journal of Mathematical Biology, 82, 8. doi: 10.1007/s00285-021-01567-5 Journal - Research Article
Collienne, L., Elmes, K., Fischer, M., Bryant, D., & Gavryushkin, A. (2021). The geometry of the space of discrete coalescent trees. arXiv. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02751 Working Paper; Discussion Paper; Technical Report