Tandy Warnow

Founder Professor of Computer Science
Area Chair, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Group
Member, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology
Affiliate, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Affiliate, Unit for Criticism and Literary Theory
Affiliate, departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bioengineering, Mathematics, Statistics, Animal Biology, Entomology, and Plant Biology
PhD (Mathematics) University of California at Berkeley, 1991
B.S. (Mathematics) University of California at Berkeley, 1984

Brief Biosketch

Fellow of the ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology), 2017
Fellow of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), 2015: For contributions to mathematical theory, algorithms, and software for large-scale molecular phylogenetics and historical linguistics

Research Overview: My research combines mathematics, computer science, probability, and statistics, in order to develop algorithms with improved accuracy for large-scale and complex estimation problems in phylogenomics (genome-scale phylogeny estimation), multiple sequence alignment, metagenomics, and historical linguistics. I am a big fan of Blue Waters, and have benefitted from two allocations. Click here for the 2017 annual report for my Blue Waters allocation on algorithms for big data phylogenomics, proteomics, and metagenomics. Click here or here for more about my research and the students I work with, and here for a brief biosketch.

Computational Phylogenetics: An introduction to designing methods for phylogeny estimation, published by Cambridge University Press (and available for purchase at Amazon and as an E-book at Google Play). Errata are posted as I find them. The image of the Monterey Cypress is there because of the NSF-funded CIPRES project, whose purpose was to develop the methods and computational infrastructure to improve large-scale phylogeny estimation. Why I wrote this book.

I dedicated the book to my PhD advisor Gene Lawler, who died in 1994; see this memorium (published in the Journal of Computational Biology, 10 Jun 2009) that I co-authored with Dan Gusfield, David Shmoys, and Jan Karel Lenstra about Gene.

Research Positions Available: I have openings in my group for graduate students (PhD or MS) to work on developing computational methods for large-scale multiple sequence alignment, phylogeny estimation, metagenomics, and even historical linguistics. Strong programming skills, mathematical intuition, and interest in collaboration are necessary. If you are already a graduate student at UIUC, please contact me directly. If you are interested in applying to UIUC for graduate school and would like to work with me, please read this first and then contact me. Unfortunately, I do not have any funding available for postdoctoral researchers. However, if you have your own source of funds and have published papers directly related to my research, I'll be glad to talk with you about working together. (If you are an undergraduate, please see this page.)

Current Funding:

Multiple sequence alignment, funded by NSF grant ABI-1458652, beginning August 2015. This project will develop new methods for multiple sequence alignment, building on our SATé, PASTA, and UPP methods.
Metagenomics, funded by NSF grant III:AF:1513629. This is a collaborative grant with the University of Maryland, for new methods for metagenomic dataset analysis, building on our TIPP method for taxon identification of reads in a metagenomic sample.
Graph-Theoretic Algorithms to Improve Phylogenomic Analyses, funded by NSF grant CCF-1535977. I am the overall PI, and this project is collaborative with Satish Rao (UC Berkeley PI) and Chandra Chekuri (UIUC). We are developing new theoretical computer science and discrete algorithms for improving the estimation of large species and gene trees, and specifically enabling statistical methods to scale to ultra-large datasets.

Recent NSF funding has supported work in phylogenomics, described here. This is still an area of very active research in my group. I also recently benefited from support of the John P. Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and earlier support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University, and Microsoft Research, New England. The Founder Professorship is funded through the Grainger Engineering Breakthroughs Initiative, which is supporting development of research in Big Data and Bioengineering at UIUC. I am grateful to the National Science Foundation for its continuous support since 1994. See this page for completed projects funded by NSF, starting in 2001.

A day in the life of an SRO at NIH (not by me)

"Plus de détails, plus de détails, disait-il à son fils, il n'y a d'originalité et de vérité que dans les détails..." -- Stendhal, Lucien Leuwen (a quote much loved by my stepfather, Martin J. Klein, and an essential guide for all scholarship).

Click here for Google Scholar Citations (i10-index 145 and h-index 60).

For prospective students and postdocs Current and former students and postdocs Teaching Recent Symposia and Software Schools CIPRES Personal Conference Calendar News Articles Academic Integrity

Downloadable papers Complete vita and publication list Software and research data Research data from UT-Austin Guidelines for writing scholarly papers Seminar Talks (2015-present) My F1000 recommendations Ethics in science

Contact info

My favorite Kimonos!