My work lies in computational statistics, with an emphasis on complex data and scientific applications. At Sciome I have worked on cheminformatics, statistical genetics, toxicology, and transcriptomics, and I have consulted on computer vision and climate data. I continually seek to implement my software development best practices, including reproducibility, unit and integration testing, version control, and clean, legible, documented code.

My PhD dissertation focused on updating forensic genetic identification methods from capillary electrophoresis, which has been in use since the 1980s and is still used today, to higher-resolution massively parallel sequencing. The end deliverable was a Bayes factor to demonstrate the strength of evidence that a suspect in a courtroom was present at a crime scene. This has involved writing a dynamic programming algorithm for DNA sequence dimension reduction, creating a Bayesian model with parameters estimated by Markov Chain Monte Carlo computation, and using the UNC supercomputing cluster.

I spent a summer in Mississippi with the US Army Corps of Engineers designing, running, and analyzing an experiment on lidar sensors for autonomous tanks. The machine vision systems they had at the time were struggling to distinguish tall grass from true obstacles, so we tested different sensors, distances, grass densities, and reflective surfaces to better understand how the lidar pulses interacted with dense patches of thin stems.

Refereed Publications

Taylor Petty, Jan Hannig, and Hari Iyer. Bayesian forensic DNA mixture deconvolution using a novel string similarity measure. In revision.

Michael Nodzenski, Min Shi, David M. Umbach, Brian Kidd, Taylor Petty, and Clarice R. Weinberg. A method for finding epistatic effects of maternal and fetal variants. Frontiers in Genetics 2025, volume 16 – 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2025.1420641

Taylor Petty, Juan D. Fernandez, Jason N. Fischell, and Luis A. De Jesús-Díaz. Lidar attenuation through a physical model of grass-like vegetation. Journal of Autonomous Vehicles and Systems 2022, volume 2, number 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4055944

Taylor Petty, Jan Hannig, Tunde I Huszar, and Hari Iyer. A new string edit distance and applications. Algorithms 2022, volume 15, number 7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/a15070242

Todd Fisher, Taylor Petty, and Sergey Tikhomirov. Nonlocally maximal and premaximal hyperbolic sets (also available on arXiv). Contemporary Mathematics 2017, volume 692. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/conm/692