Research

Postdoctoral Fellow · Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington

Motivation

The challenge of representing natural processes through mathematical frameworks to capture their inherent complexity fascinates me. Developing appropriate statistical tools for these representations through the lens of Object Oriented Data Analysis is a core motivation that drives my work.

I am eager to contribute to projects where building and analyzing complex mathematical objects can enhance our understanding of pressing biological questions, especially in ecology, disease tracking and disease prevention, as well as sociological questions aimed to improving long-standing problems. My goal is to bridge meaningful biological/sociological insight with methodological innovation, enabling nuanced and data-driven perspectives on how living systems function and evolve.

Current Research

My current postdoctoral position with Dr. Amy Willis aims to build new statistical tools for the analysis of phylogenetic trees.

We introduced a continuous metric between phylogenetic trees with overlapping but non-identical leaves, reflecting the reality of evolutionary histories for transferred genes shared by some but not all bacteria and archea and providing an intuitive comparison method for these trees.

In Progress

Development of quick and efficient algorithms to compute this distance, along with an R package for its implementation.

Analysis of the properties of the Sample Fréchet Mean for trees in our metric space.

Collaboration with Dr. Armeen Taeb on a new tool for tree reconstruction, employing a Poset structure to guarantee stability and a low False Discovery Rate.

In Progress

Finalizing the manuscript and publishing an accompanying R package.

Publications

Published Articles

1. Valdez Cabrera, M. A., & Willis, A. D. (2026). Geometry of the space of phylogenetic trees with non-identical leaves. Published
Advances in Applied Mathematics, 178.
doi.org/10.1016/j.aam.2026.103091 →
2. Valdez Cabrera, M. A., & Willis, A. D. (2025). Distances Between Extension Spaces of Phylogenetic Trees. Published
IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, 22(2), 614–627.
doi:10.1109/TCBBIO.2025.3526422 →
3. Mirembe, B. G., Valdez Cabrera, M., van der Straten, A., Nakalega, R., Cobbing, M., Mgodi, N. M., Palanee-Phillips, T., Mayo, A. J., Dadabhai, S., Mansoor, L. E., Siva, S., Nair, G., Chinula, L., Akello, C. A., Nakabiito, C., Soto-Torres, L. E., Baeten, J. M., & Brown, E. R. (2022). Correlates of Dapivirine Vaginal Ring Acceptance among Women Participating in an Open Label Extension Trial. Published
AIDS and Behavior.
doi:10.1007/s10461-022-03841-z →
4. Urquídez, O., & Valdez, M. (2019). Diseño de grafos pesados con n-cíclos persistentes. Published
Morfismos, Vol. 23 No. 1.

Preprints

1. Valdez Cabrera, M. A., Willis, A. D., & Taeb, A. (2025). Consensus Tree Estimation with False Discovery Rate Control via Partially Ordered Sets. Preprint
doi:10.48550/arXiv.2511.23433 →