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CSE Distinguished Lecture Series: Tandy Warnow, "Genome-scale estimation of the Tree of Life"

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Abstract:

Estimating the Tree of Life is one of the grand computational challenges in science and has applications to many areas of science and biomedical research. Despite intensive research over the past several decades, many problems remain inadequately solved. In this talk, I will discuss species tree estimation from genome-scale datasets.

In addition, I will describe these problems and what is understood about these them from a mathematical perspective. Furthermore, I identify some of the open problems in this area where mathematical research, drawing from graph theory, combinatorial optimization, and probability and statistics, is needed.

This talk will be accessible to mathematicians, computer scientists, probabilists and statisticians, and does not require any knowledge of biology

 

Bio:

Tandy Warnow is the foundering professor of the Department of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). In addition, she has a dual appointment between the Department of Computer Science and Department of Bioengineering. Warnow is a member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and an affiliate in six other departments at UIUC (Statistics, Mathematics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Plant Biology, Animal Biology, and Entomology). 

Warnow has published more than 130 papers in the area of computational molecular biology, and her research combines mathematics, computer science, and statistics to develop improved models and algorithms for reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary lineage in both biology and historical linguistics. Her current research focuses on phylogeny and alignment estimation for very large datasets, estimating species trees from collections of gene trees, and metagenomics.

Warnow received her Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Gene Lawler and did postdoctoral training with Simon Tavaré and Michael Waterman at the University of Southern California. She received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award in Science and Engineering in 1996, an Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2006, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for 2011.

Status

  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Devin Young
  • Created:09/30/2016
  • Modified By:Fletcher Moore
  • Modified:04/13/2017