Tandy Warnow facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Tandy Warnow
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Tandy Warnow speaking at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in 2018
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Tandy Jo Warnow
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| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley (BS, PhD) |
| Spouse(s) | George Chacko |
| Children | 2 |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer Science Computational Biology Phylogenetics Metagenomics Multiple Sequence Alignment |
| Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign University of Pennsylvania University of Texas |
| Thesis | Combinatorial algorithms for constructing phylogenetic trees (1991) |
| Doctoral advisor | Eugene Lawler |
| Other academic advisors | Michael Waterman Simon Tavare |
| Doctoral students | Luay Nakhleh |
Tandy Warnow is an American computer scientist. She is a top professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is famous for her work on building "evolutionary trees." These trees show how living things or even languages are related over time. She also creates ways to line up many sequences of data, like DNA.
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About Tandy Warnow
Tandy Warnow studied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her first degree in 1984. Later, she received her PhD in 1991. Her main teacher for her PhD was Eugene Lawler.
Her Work and Career
After finishing her studies, Dr. Warnow did more research. She worked at the University of Southern California from 1991 to 1992. Then, she worked at Sandia National Laboratories until 1993.
In 1993, she became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She stayed there until 1999. Then, she moved to the University of Texas. In 2014, Dr. Warnow joined the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC). There, she is a very important professor in the Computer Science Department. She also helps out in many other departments. These include Animal Biology, Bioengineering, and Mathematics.
Studying Language Families
In 1995, Dr. Warnow worked with Donald Ringe and Ann Taylor. They used computer methods to study how Indo-European languages are related. These languages include English, Spanish, and Hindi. Their work helped figure out when different language groups split apart.
Their research supported the idea that Anatolian languages were the first to separate. These languages were spoken in ancient Turkey. They also found that Armenian and Greek might be closely related.
They also helped explain how Germanic languages fit into the family tree. They suggested that early Germanic languages were close to Balto-Slavic languages. But then, Germanic tribes moved west. This caused their language to mix with Italic and Celtic languages. Later, Dr. Warnow and her team improved this method. They showed how languages can borrow words from each other. This means language evolution can be like a network, not just a tree.
Building Biological Trees
In 2009, Dr. Warnow and her team released software called SATé. This program helps create "evolutionary trees" for living things. It also lines up their DNA or protein sequences. Older methods were very slow. They could only compare a few dozen species at a time. SATé was much faster. It could build accurate trees and alignments for thousands of species.
Since 2014, Dr. Warnow has focused on three main areas.
- Making multiple sequence alignments for huge amounts of data.
- Estimating species trees using many genes.
- Studying metagenomics, which looks at all the DNA in an environment.
She developed a new method called PASTA. This method is even better than SATé. It can create very accurate alignments for up to 1,000,000 sequences. She also created the ASTRAL method. This method helps build species trees correctly. It works even when gene trees are different due to "incomplete lineage sorting." This happens when genes don't perfectly match the species' family tree.
Awards and Recognition
Dr. Warnow has received many important awards.
- In 2020, she was named a Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering.
- In 2014, she became a Founder Professor of Engineering at UIUC.
- She received the David Bruton Jr. Centennial Professorship in Computer Science in 2010.
- She was given a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2011.
- She also received a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 2003.
- In 1996, she got a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship.
- She received the NSF Young Investigator Award in 1994.
In 2015, she was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This was for her important work in computer science. In 2017, she became a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). In 2021, she was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Personal Life
Tandy Warnow's mother was Joan Warnow-Blewett, a well-known archivist. Her father was Morton Warnow. Her twin sister, Kimmen Sjolander, is also a researcher in bioinformatics. Tandy Warnow is married to George Chacko. He is also a professor at UIUC. They have two daughters, Kristin and Menaka.
