This is the home page for Peter E. Midford. I am currently a a postdoctoral researcher. I am located at the University of Kansas, in Mark Holder's lab. My current work focuses on comparative methods and models of evolutionary change. I am also working on methods for analyzing complex behavior sequences. Much of this work involves ontologies.
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.
I am currently involved in two funded projects.
The first is the Cipres project, in which I am involved in maintaining a set of bridge modules to allow Mesquite to communicate with a Cipres-developed runtime library. I am also involved in developing an ontology of existing models of evolutionary change as a contribution to the development of the proposed nexml file format.
The second project is ontology development for the Phenoscape project. I was responsible for the initial cloning of the Zebrafish Anatomy Ontology to form the baseline for Phenoscape's new Teleost Anatomy Ontology (TAO). I am currently building the project's taxonomy ontology, which will provide a list of species names for building character state assertions when combined with the TAO and the PATO ontology of qualities.
I am also continuing my involvement, at a lower level, with the Mesquite project. This includes ongoing development of the PDAP:PDTREE package, which is a port of part of the earlier version of PDAP to the Mesquite system.
I also am continuing my work into the use of ontologies to describe and model complex behavior patterns. This work is both theoretical, involving models of evolution that might apply to ontology-based descriptions of behavior, as well as practical, exemplified by the owlwatcher project. Some of my earlier work with ontologies is described here.
My CV (pdf) is here.
My FOAF file is here.
Last update of this page:7 November 2007