Manuel Lafond

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Université de Sherbrooke. As of June 2026, I am also the Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the department.

In my research, I work on the design of algorithms in bioinformatics with a focus on phylogenetics and graph theory. My research includes theoretical and practical approches for the reconstruction and comparison of evolutionary scenarios. While I have worked on Darwinian trees for some time, I have recently gained interest in phylogenetic networks, which allow non-tree-like scenarios such as lateral gene transfer and hybridization - while also allowing me to apply graph theory to computational biology. I mainly develop algorithms for NP-hard problems, for example to compute edit distances between networks, using techniques from parameterized complexity and approximation algorithms.

I am also an avid follower (and occasional contributor) of the theory of algorithms, and I enjoy applying the latest developments in parameterized and approximation algorithms to practical problems in computational biology. At the same time, I enjoy working on empirical and (semi-)applied papers from time to time, see references below.

Prior to my current position, I was an NSERC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa with David Sankoff (2016-2018) and I obtained my PhD at the University of Montreal with Nadia El-Mabrouk (2012-2016).

Some publications that I like to put forward:

• Max Dupré la Tour, Manuel Lafond, Ndiamé Ndiaye. "On the Hardness of Recognizing Graphs of Small Mim-Width and Its Variants.", ICALP 2026. Credits to Max and Ndiamé, paper would not exist without them.
• Max Dupré la Tour, Manuel Lafond, Ndiamé Ndiaye. "Recognizing Leaf Powers and Pairwise Compatibility Graphs is NP-Complete.", SODA 2026. Credits to Max and Ndiamé, paper would not exist without them.
• Manuel Lafond, Céline Scornavacca. "Rehabilitating the benefits of gene tree correction in the presence of incomplete lineage sorting". Peer Community Journal, 2026.
• Reza Kalhor, Guillaume Beslon, Manuel Lafond, Céline Scornavacca. "A rigorous framework to classify the postduplication fate of paralogous genes". Journal of Computational Biology, 2024.
• Lafond, Manuel. "Recognizing k-leaf powers in polynomial time, for constant k.", SODA 2022.
• Lafond, Manuel, Mona Meghdari Miardan, and David Sankoff. "Accurate prediction of orthologs in the presence of divergence after duplication.", ISMB 2018.

Unrelated: students who use LLMs in their homework, listen to this YouTube video: What AI does to the minds of novice coders