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 engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is famous for her work on building evolutionary trees. These trees show how different living things or even languages are related over time. She also creates methods to compare many DNA or protein sequences at once.
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Who Is Tandy Warnow?
Tandy Warnow studied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her first degree in 1984. Later, she completed her advanced degree (a PhD) in 1991. Her main teacher was Eugene Lawler.
What Does a Computer Scientist Do?
After finishing her studies, Dr. Warnow worked as a researcher. She worked at the University of Southern California and Sandia National Laboratories. In 1993, she became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She then moved to the University of Texas in 1999.
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 science departments.
How Do We Study Language History?
In 1995, Dr. Warnow and her team studied how languages change. They looked at Indo-European languages, a big family of languages. They used computer methods to figure out when different languages split apart. Their work helped show that Anatolian languages were the first to separate.
They also found that Armenian language and Greek language are closely related. They even figured out how Germanic languages fit into this language family tree. This was tricky because Germanic languages changed a lot. Dr. Warnow's team later improved their methods. They now show how languages can borrow words from each other, not just split like a tree.
How Do We Study Biological Evolution?
In 2009, Dr. Warnow and her team created software called SATé. This program helps scientists compare many DNA or protein sequences at once. It also helps build evolutionary trees for thousands of species. Before SATé, scientists could only compare a few dozen species at a time. This software made it much faster to study how living things are related.
Since 2014, Dr. Warnow has focused on even bigger challenges. She works on comparing huge amounts of DNA data. She also studies how to build accurate species trees using many different genes. Her PASTA method can compare up to 1,000,000 sequences! She also developed the ASTRAL method. This method helps build accurate species trees even when gene histories are a bit mixed up.
Awards and Honors
Dr. Warnow has received many important awards for her work.
- In 1994, she received the NSF Young Investigator Award.
- She was given a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in 1996.
- In 2003, she became a Radcliffe Institute Fellow.
- She received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2011.
- In 2015, she was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This was for her work on evolutionary trees and language history.
- In 2017, she became a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).
- She was also named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2021.
Family Life
Tandy Warnow comes from a family of talented people. Her mother, Joan Warnow-Blewett, was a famous archivist. Her twin sister, Kimmen Sjolander, is also a bioinformatics researcher. Tandy Warnow is married to George Chacko, who is also a computer science professor. They have two daughters, Kristin and Menaka.
