7/21/2016
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CS Professor Tandy Warnow comes to Illinois from the University of Texas at Austin, where she had been since 1999 and where she was the David Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor in Computer Science. Prior to that she had been at the University of Pennsylvania since 1993. She received her PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991.
Warnow is an expert in the application of mathematics and computer science to developing algorithms for complex problems in the fields of phylogenomics, which is the intersection of evolution and genomics, and metagenomics, which is the study of genetic material in the environment. “There’s a lot of mathematical depth. You can satisfy your desire for mathematical depth while also having an impact on the practicing biologist,” Tandy said. “Increasingly I’ve gotten more and more involved in making software that can analyze data with greater accuracy than any other method.”
Warnow is a Founder Professor in Bioengineering and Computer Science, which is funded through the Grainger Engineering Breakthroughs Initiative, the result of a $100 million investment in the College of Engineering. She has a joint appointment with the Department of Bioengineering. “I see myself as a computer scientist/applied mathematician, but someone who works very much on biological data. Someone very, very involved with data. The bringing together people from the data side and the computation side in a very serious way is a tremendously powerful combination. And I see it happening here already and I see the opportunity for it to happen even more. Tremendously visible here.”
She is excited by the opportunities to work closely with colleagues across the Illinois campus. “At Texas, a lot of my collaborations were away from Texas. Here I think I’m going to have a huge number of research partnerships. The IGB here is one area that I’m expecting to have a lot of collaborations,” she said. “The opportunities for research here are fantastic, absolutely fantastic—first rate for me.”
That’s not the only reason she’s looking forward to joining Illinois. “I fell in love with the University of Illinois, not just because of the exciting science going on here, but because of the tremendous sense of community at the University, and throughout Champaign-Urbana," she said.
Warnow is looking forward to building her research group at the University of Illinois and is happy to talk with students interested in doing research in computational biology. She is planning on teaching a graduate course in computational biology in the Spring 2015 semester, focused on computational genomics, phylogenomics, and metagenomics, and will introduce students to open research problems in these areas.
Warnow received an NSF National Young Investigator Award in 1994, a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in 1996, A Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study Fellowship in 2003, and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2011.