Following formal undergraduate training in computer science (at Kiev State University, Ukraine), I received a PhD from the interdisciplinary program in Applied Mathematics at the University of Arizona. My theoretical graduate research into statistical methodology for evolutionary analyses of coding sequence alignments found an application in an HIV research group at UCSD, which I joined as a postdoctoral fellow in 2003. Until 2016, I was an associate professor in the Divisions of Infectious Diseases and Biomedical Informatics in the UCSD Department of Medicine. In addition, I am the director the Bioinformatics and Information Technologies Core at the UCSD Center of AIDS Research. In 2016, I joined the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine at Temple University.

My research interest include developing models and computational approaches for comparative analysis of sequence data, especially large and rich data set from measurably evolving pathogens, such as HIV-1, Influenza A virus and Hepatitis C virus. My group has published a number of methodological and applied papers applying evolutionary algorithms and machine learning techniques to complex problems in sequence evolution, especially in the context of HIV population history, adaptation to new hosts, transmission, immune escape, and the development of drug resistance.