This is the home page for Peter E. Midford. I am currently a freelance bioinformatics researcher living in Carbondale IL. My current work focuses on comparative methods and models of evolutionary change, particularly for complex behavior sequences.
My doctoral work included a study of social learning and tradition in free-living Florida scrub-jays (Aphelocoma coerulescens), under the supervision of Jack Hailman. The tradition involved jays digging in the center of a plastic ring for buried food. A paper describing this project may be found here. I also contributed to the PDAP comparative methods package of Ted Garland while working on my degree.
I spent a year in Bochum, Germany looking at courtship behavior in pigeons as part of a project to design a virtual pigeon for playback experiments. During the period, I also performed some experiments in human perception of biological motion stimuli.
My current research focuses on comparative methods for complex characters, especially characters related to behavior. To code these characters, I am using knowledge representation techniques developed in the field of Artificial Intelligence. In particular, I am constructing a series of "ontologies" based on published ethograms as well as raw behavioral data. There is more information and rendering of a sea turtle nesting ontology I constructed in 2001-2002. here.
I have also released several ontologies for courtship sequences in species of Habronattus jumping spiders. I am currently extending these and translating them into the semantic web ontology language known as OWL.
I am also working on several smaller projects related to the Mesquite system. A Mesquite module providing virtually all the functionality of the PDTREE program in Garland's PDAP package was released in late September 2002, and last updated in mid August 2005. The module is available here. I am also working on separate projects testing evolutionary convergence and for the presence of trends.
A web-readable copy of my CV is here.
Last update of this page: 8 September 2005