Manuel Lafond

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Université de Sherbrooke and a proud member of the GRIF - the Research group on fundamental computer science of UdeS.

My main area of research is algorithms for bioinformatics, with an emphasis on the theoretical aspects of problems that arise in computational biology. I am especially interested in the development of models and algorithms for evolution that can be applied to reconstruct phylogenies, to infer important evolutionary events such as gene duplication or horizontal gene transfer, and to predict orthologous/paralogous genes.
I am also an avid follower (and occasional contributor) of the theory of algorithms, and I enjoy applying the latest developments in parameterized and approximation algorithms to practical problems in computational biology. In fact, while bioinformatics is often seen as computer science to the service of biology, I believe that the converse also holds, i.e. that biology can assist the development of algorithms. There are several biologically motivated problems that led to the development of novel techniques in algorithms, and there is more to be discovered with continued interactions between the fields.

Prior to my current position, I was an NSERC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa with David Sankoff (2016-2018) and I obtained my PhD at the University of Montreal with Nadia El-Mabrouk (2012-2016).

Some representative publications:

• Lafond, Manuel. "Recognizing k-leaf powers in polynomial time, for constant k.", SODA 2022.
• Lafond, Manuel, Binhai Zhu, and Peng Zou. "Computing the Tandem Duplication Distance is NP-Hard.", SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics (2022).
• Sanchez, Alitzel Lopez, and Manuel Lafond. "Colorful orthology clustering in bounded-degree similarity graphs." Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2021)
• Lafond, Manuel, Mona Meghdari Miardan, and David Sankoff. "Accurate prediction of orthologs in the presence of divergence after duplication.", Bioinformatics (2018).