I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Noah A. Rosenberg's lab, Stanford University. Previously, I was a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science, Rice University, where I worked with Dr. Luay K. Nakhleh from 2006 to 2009. I received a Master's and Ph.D. degree, both in computer science, in May 2008 and September 2009.
I was born and grew up in Việt Nam. My full name in Vietnamese is Thân Văn Cường. I received my B.S. in computer science from Hanoi University of Technology in 2003. In 2005, I was awarded a fellowship from the Vietnam Education Foundation to study in the U.S.
My current research is in phylogenetics, an area of computational biology that is concerned with the reconstruction of species phylogenies. I am also interested in combinatorics and graph theory, combinatorial optimization, and computational complexity theory.
C. Than and N. Rosenberg, "Mathematical properties of the deep coalescence cost." Manuscript in preparation, 2011. [draft]
C. Than and N. Rosenberg, "Consistency properties of species tree inference by minimizing deep coalescences." Journal of Computational Biology, 18(1):1–15, 2011. (Highlighted in the Janurary, 2011 issue of the journal.) [pdf]
Y. Yu, C. Than, J. Degnan, and L. Nakhleh. "Coalescent histories on phylogenetic networks and detection of hybridization despite incomplete lineage sorting." Systematic Biology, in press, 2010. [pdf]
C. Than and L. Nakhleh, "Inference of parsimonious species phylogenies from multi-locus data by minimizing deep coalescences." In: Estimating Species Trees: Practical and Theoretical Aspects, L.L. Knowles and L.S. Kubatko (eds.), Wiley-VCH, 79–98, 2010.
C. Than, L. Nakhleh, "Species tree inference by minimizing deep coalescences." PLoS Computational Biology, 5(9):e1000501, 2009. [pdf]
C. Than, D. Ruths, and L. Nakhleh, "PhyloNet: a software package for analyzing and reconstructing reticulate evolutionary relationships." BMC Bioinformatics, 9:322, 2008. [pdf]
C. Than, G. Jin, and L. Nakhleh, "Integrating sequence and topology for efficient and accurate detection of horizontal gene transfer." Proceedings of the Sixth RECOMB Comparative Genomics Satellite Workshop. Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI 5267), 113–127, 2008.
I. Kanj, L. Nakhleh, C. Than, and G. Xia, "Seeing the trees and their branches in the network is hard." Theoretical Computer Science (TCS), 401:153–164, 2008. [pdf]
C. Than, R. Sugino, H. Innan, and L. Nakhleh, "Efficient inference of bacterial strain trees from genome-scale multi-locus data." The 16th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB). Bioinformatics, 24:i123–131, 2008. [pdf]
C. Than and L. Nakhleh, "SPR-based tree reconciliation: non-binary trees and multiple solutions." Proceedings of the Sixth Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC), 251–260, 2008.
I. Kanj, L. Nakhleh, C. Than, and G. Xia, "Seeing the trees and their branches in the network is hard." Proceedings of the Tenth Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (ICTCS), 82–93, 2007.
C. Than, D. Ruths, H. Innan, and L. Nakhleh, "Confounding factors in HGT detection: statistical error, coalescent effects, and multiple solutions." Journal of Computational Biology, 14(4): 517–535, 2007. [pdf]
C. Than, D. Ruths, H. Innan, and L. Nakhleh, "Identifiability issues in the phylogenetic-based detection of horizontal gene transfer." Proceedings of the Fourth RECOMB Comparative Genomics Satellite Workshop. Lectures Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI 4205), 215–229, 2006.
B. Nguyen, C. Than, P. Nguyen, and B. Ho, "A mixed similarity measure for data with numeric, symbolic and ordinal attributes." IEIC (Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers) Technical Report, 104:67–72, 2004.
CIPRES Annual Meeting, 2009.
The Sixth RECOMB Comparative Genomics Satellite Workshop, 2008.
The 16th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, 2008.
The Sixth Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference, 2008.
The Tenth Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science, 2007.
PhyloNet (developed with the Bioinformatics Group at Rice)
tree.zip: inference of species trees, enumeration of binary trees and shapes, and measures of tree balance.
Datasets: list of datasets for the species tree/gene tree problem.
Mailing address:
371 Serra Mall
Department of Biology
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305, USA
Email: cvthan [at] stanford [dot] edu