Paula Tataru defended her PhD thesis on using mathematical modeling and computational tools to analyze population genetics and molecular data. Her research involved using stochastic context-free grammars, hidden Markov models, discrete time Markov chains, and continuous time Markov chains to study problems involving RNA structure prediction, motif discovery, identity-by-descent modeling, and modeling allele frequency data. She described these modeling techniques and their applications to several of her published works and papers in preparation.