Warnow elected 2017 International Society for Computational Biology Fellow

Tandy Warnow, a University of Illinois Founder Professor of Engineering, was among the eight scientists recently elected as 2017 Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.

“ISCB Fellows represent the absolute pillars of our community,” said Alfonso Valencia, ISCB president. “Each of these very accomplished researchers has made exceptional contributions to the ISCB’s mission to advance the scientific understanding of living systems through computation. ISCB Fellows are an increasingly active group of the society, driving the scientific excellence of our field and opening new avenues to our community.”

With more than 130 published papers, Warnow combines mathematics, computer science, and statistics to develop improved models and algorithms for reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories in both biology and historical linguistics. Her current research focuses on phylogeny and alignment estimation for very large datasets (10,000 to 1,000,000 sequences) that may be highly fragmentary, estimating species trees and phylogenetic networks from collections of gene trees, and taxon identification in metagenomics.

She and her students use real data and perform massive simulations to evaluate the performance of methods they develop. They also collaborate closely with biologists and linguists in data analysis. 

An interdisciplinary researcher, Warnow is a faculty member in the Departments of Bioengineering and Computer Science, and she is a member of the U of I Carl Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. She is also an affiliate in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Statistics, Mathematics, Animal Biology, Plant Biology, and Entomology, as well the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Coordinated Science Lab (CSL). She’s also a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

Warnow will be recognized at the ISCB members meeting on July 24, 2017, during the Society¹s international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) in Prague, Czech Republic.