My name is Edward Li and I am a student at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Ecology has always been a passion of mine, and I decided to spend my summer at the Davalos Lab in order to gain precious hands-on research experience. Because bioinformatics is such an up-and-coming field, I decided to pursue a project in this area in order to further my own knowledge of the subject. Current models of evolutionary history assume independence between character traits, but studies have found that data sets often have hidden dependencies. These dependencies undermine existing phylogenies and skew our perceptions of evolutionary relationships. My project uses the bat as a model organism and deals with identifying these dependencies through statistical analysis in R. Using simulations, I plan to create ‘perfect’ evolutionary models that can be used to see what unbiased data should look like. I hope to apply the skills that I learned during my time at the Davalos lab to my future career goals.