Warnow Invested as a Founder Professor

On February 26, CS and Bioengineering Professor Tandy Warnow was one of five College of Engineering faculty members invested as either Willett Professors or Founder Professors.

 

Warnow, who was invested as a Founder Professor of Engineering, is an expert in the application of mathematics and computer science to developing algorithms for complex problems in the fields of phylogenomics (the intersection of evolution and genomics)  and metagenomics (the study of genetic material in the environment).

Warnow joined the University of Illinois in 2014. Prior to that she had been the David Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where she had taught since 1999. She was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania from 1993 to 1999.

She received her PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991. She described her early academic career as one where she was driven by “the beauty of mathematics.” A postdoctoral appointment at the University of Southern California and then her experiences as a new faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania caused that view to transform. She met and collaborated with linguists and biologists , and found the experience exhilarating. In particular she found herself drawn the use of mathematics in studies of biological and linguistic evolution.

“I had this experience of looking at data and having it open my eyes to things you cannot predict from theory or predict from mathematics,” she said. “That was the transformation for me—dealing with data.”

Her work was recently featured in a series of articles in Science on the Avian Phylogenomics Project. This project used the genomic sequences of 48 bird species to develop a new understanding of the evolutionary family tree of birds.

Warnow’s work has also been applied her work to historical linguistics, developing and using statistical models to capture the evolution of languages and to develop and implement statistically based and combinatorial methods to reconstruct language phylogenies.

In her remarks at the investiture, Warnow told the crowd, “We are all of us so lucky to be here. We have work we love to do. We get to try to inspire our students to have the same faith in themselves, to love something, and to keep doing the thing they love.”

Among the many recognitions for her research achievements, Warnow received an NSF National Young Investigator Award in 1994, a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in 1996, a Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study Fellowship in 2003, and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2011. Warnow served as the chair of the NIH study section on Biological Data Management and Analysis (BDMA) from 2010 to 2012.

Also invested on that day with Warnow were Brian Cunningham (Bioengineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Eduardo Fradkin (Physics) as Willett Professors; and Edward Seidel (Physics) and Jun Song (Physics and Bioengineering) as fellow Founder Professors.

The Willett Professorships were established in honor of the late Donald B. Willett by his wife Elizabeth Willett.  The Founder Professorships in Engineering are made possible by the Grainger Engineering Breakthroughs Initiative, the result of a $100 million investment in the College of Engineering. The Founder Professorships commemorate Stillman Williams Robinson, the first faculty member to teach engineering at the University of Illinois and the first dean when the College of Engineering was organized in 1878.