Chiara Epifanio

Chiara Epifanio is a researcher (INFO-01/A) at the University of Palermo, based in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. She holds regular office hours on Tuesdays 14:30–17:00 in Room 104, first floor, Via Archirafi 34, and can be reached at chiara.epifanio@unipa.it.

Over the past fifteen years she has designed and taught a diverse portfolio of courses spanning Programming, Bioinformatics, Advanced Programming, Teaching Methodologies and Techniques for Computer Science and Pattern Discovery for Life Sciences. These offerings serve degree programmes in Mathematics, Computer Science, Statistics & Data Science, and the recently launched curricula in Data, Algorithms & Machine Intelligence and Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence.

Her research lies at the intersection of combinatorics on words, string algorithms, and bioinformatics. She has made sustained contributions to the design of alignment-free distances for biological data, the theory of Sturmian words and their associated graphs, suffix automata tolerant to mismatches, and compact data structures such as linear-size suffix tries. The work repeatedly draws on deep results from formal language theory, automata theory, and discrete mathematics to solve practical problems in sequence analysis.

Publications trend: From 2004 onward she has produced a steady stream of peer-reviewed articles that move from foundational combinatorial results on Sturmian words and critical factorization theorems toward application-driven studies on approximate string matching and genomic data mining. A marked acceleration is visible in the 2023 publications addressing k-Hamming and k-edit distances, reflecting current demands in large-scale biological data analytics.

Scientific awards: None explicitly mentioned in the provided material.

Advising & grants: No PhD or Master’s students are listed in the supplied pages, and no funded project descriptions are available.

Laboratories & teams: While no specific lab is named, her teaching and research are embedded within the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, which hosts groups in algorithms, discrete mathematics, and bioinformatics, and provides access to the university’s ATeN Center and other research infrastructures.