Tandy Warnow

Founder Professor of Engineering
Professor of the Departments of Computer Science and Bioengineering
Institute for Genomic Biology, Biocomplexity Theme
Affiliate in the departments of Mathematics, Statistics, Animal Biology, and Entomology
PhD (Mathematics) University of California at Berkeley, 1991
B.S. (Mathematics) University of California at Berkeley, 1984

I will co-chair GLBIO 2017 with Tanya Berger-Wolf (UIC); accepted full papers will be published by PLOS One. GLBIO 2017 will have a new format, with a mixture of Special Sessions (organized by the scientific community) in addition to the regular track. Special sessions can be workshops on specialized topics, tutorials, software schools, or almost anything of interest to the research community. The conference will be May 15-17, 2017, at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The deadline is October 1 to submit proposals for special sessions; see the call for special sessions for more information.

ACM Fellow (2016): For contributions to mathematical theory, algorithms, and software for large-scale molecular phylogenetics and historical linguistics.

My former student Siavash Mirarab received honorable mention for ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2016 (UCSD announcement) (ACM announcement).

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.

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. Click here for more about my research.

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Teaching Spring 2017

Graduate course (TuTh 11-12:20) CS/BIOE 598AGB (Algorithmic Computational Genomics).
Undergraduate course (MWF 9-10:20 AM) BIOE 298: Introduction to bioinformatics for bioengineering students

Current Research and NSF Funding: My research in currently funded by three grants from the National Science Foundation.

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.

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 124 and h-index 53).

For prospective students and postdocs Current and former students and postdocs Prior courses: CS 173(b) and CS 598AGB Recent Symposia and Software Schools CIPRES Personal Conference Calendar

Downloadable papers Complete vita and publication list Brief vita Software Former lab website How to write your first paper Seminar Talks (2015-present)

Contact info