#  OEB Seminar Series: Liam Revell 

 



    ![Portrait of seminar speaker Liam Revell](/sites/g/files/omnuum6811/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-08/Liam%20Revell.jpg?itok=jSbOPWlJ) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 23, 2025** 

 03:30PM - 04:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Northwest Building, B101, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA**  



 

 



 

[Liam Revell](https://faculty.umb.edu/liam.revell/)   
Professor of Biology   
University of Massachusetts, Boston

*Unlocking a flexible set of new models for discrete & continuous trait evolution in phylogenetic comparative biology*

**Abstract:** The practical utility of many modern phylogenetic comparative methods can depend on how accurately mathematical models capture the evolutionary process of traits. In a nearly decade-old paper, Boucher and Démery (2016) identified an interesting utility of the equivalence of an equal-rates, symmetric, ordered Markov chain and continuous stochastic diffusion (in the limit as the number of steps in our chain goes to ∞) for fitting a model with no tractable analytic likelihood function -- in their case, Brownian motion with reflecting boundaries. Professor Revell refers to this equivalence as the discretized diffusion approximation. He subsequently realized that this approximation could help unlock a number of other new or intractable models in the phylogenetic comparative analysis of discrete and continuous trait data, some of which he will explore in this presentation.

**Host:** Professor Cavender-Bares



 

 



 

 See also:- [ OEB Seminars ](/event-type/oeb-seminars)
 
 

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