Tandy Warnow

Special advisor to the Head of Computer Science, 2016-present
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 and Full CV

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

Fall 2019 course, CS 581: Algorithmic Computational Genomics: Please consider taking this class if you are a graduate student with strong mathematical training and are interested in potentially doing research in algorithm design and implementation, with an application to biology or linguistics. No background in biology or linguistics is needed -- seriously! This is a course on applied algorithms, focusing on the use of discrete mathematics, graph theory, probability theory, statistics, machine learning, and simulations, to design and analyze algorithms for phylogeny (evolutionary tree) estimation, multiple sequence alignment, genome-scale phylogenetics, genome assembly and annotation, and metagenomics. Each of these biological problems is important and unsolved, so that new methods are needed. Hence, this course will provide opportunities for computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians, to do original and important research that can have an impact on biology. Every year, at least one student in the course has done a project that was subsequently published in scientific conferences and journals; you can be one of these students! For examples of these papers, see Mirarab et al., Bioinformatics 2014, Zimmermann et al., BMC Genomics 2014, Davidson et al., BMC Genomics 2015, Chou et al., BMC Genomics 2015, Vachaspati and Warnow, BMC Genomics 2015, Nute and Warnow, BMC Genomics 2016, Christensen et al., Algorithms for Molecular Biology 2018, and Pattabiraman and Warnow, ACM-BCB 2018.

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.

Bioinformatics and Phylogenetics: Seminal Contributions of Bernard Moret, published by Springer. This book is a Festschrift for Bernard Moret, who retired from EPFL in December 2016. The book contains a collection of self-contained chapters that can be used for an advanced course in computational biology and bioinformatics.

Research Positions Available: I have openings in my group for graduate students (PhD or MS) and postdocs 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 a graduate student, please read this first and then contact me.
If you are an undergraduate, please see this page.
If you are looking for a postdoc position, see this.

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 146 and h-index 61).

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

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

Contact info

My favorite Kimonos!