Olga Zhaxybayeva is a computational biologist and evolutionary genomicist known for her research on horizontal gene transfer and phylogenomics in microbial evolution. Her work examines how genes move between organisms and the methodological challenges of reconstructing evolutionary histories from genomic data. She is a professor at Dartmouth College and has contributed to debates about the tree of life and the nature of prokaryotic evolution.
Pioneered methods for detecting and quantifying horizontal gene transfer in microbial genomes
Advanced phylogenomic approaches to reconstructing the tree of life
Contributed to understanding of reticulate evolution and its implications for biological classification
Developed frameworks for distinguishing vertical inheritance from lateral gene transfer signals