Bioinformatics and Phylogenetics: Seminal Contributions of Bernard Moret

Dr. Tandy Warnow is the Founder Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is also an affiliate in the departments of Mathematics, Statistics, Bioengineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Animal Biology, Entomology, and Plant Biology. Tandy received her PhD in Mathematics in 1991 at UC Berkeley under the direction of Gene Lawler, and did postdoctoral training with Simon Tavaré and Michael Waterman at USC. Her research combines computer science, statistics, and discrete mathematics, focusing on developing improved models and algorithms for reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories in biology and historical linguistics. She has published more than 160 papers and one textbook, graduated 11 PhD students, and has 5 current PhD students. Her awards include the NSF Young Investigator Award (1994), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award (1996), a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2006), and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2011). She was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2015 and of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2017. Warnow succeeded Bernard Moret as the director of the NSF-funded CIPRES (Cyber-Infrastructure for Phylogenetic Research) project, whose goal was “To provide the computational infrastructure needed to reconstruct phylogenies for millions of taxa”.