Tandy Warnow

Tandy Warnow is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, holding multiple appointments across campus. She is the W. W. Grainger Chair in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, where she also serves as Associate Head. Her additional affiliations include Professorships in Mathematics, Statistics, and the Coordinated Science Lab, as well as appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. She also has affiliate status in several departments including Electrical and Computer Engineering, Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior, Entomology, and Plant Biology.

Warnow's research spans computational biology, network science, and historical linguistics. Her primary focus is on algorithmic problems in computational biology, developing methods for phylogenomics, multiple sequence alignment, and metagenomics. She has made significant contributions to large-scale phylogeny estimation, with theoretical guarantees and empirical validation. In network science, she collaborates with George Chacko on understanding scientific communities and developing novel clustering methods. Her work in historical linguistics involves inferring evolutionary histories of languages.

Warnow's recent publications (2024-2025) demonstrate her continued leadership in both computational biology and network science. Her work shows a consistent trend toward developing scalable algorithms for large datasets, with particular attention to theoretical guarantees and empirical performance. She has made important contributions to community detection in networks, phylogenetic placement methods, and metagenomic analysis.

Her scientific honors include being a Fellow of the ISCB (2017), ACM (2015), and AAAS (2021), as well as receiving the Senior Scientist Award from the International Society for Computational Biology in 2024. She currently serves as Treasurer of the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the ISCB (2025-2027).

Warnow maintains an active research program with multiple current grants from the National Science Foundation, including a collaborative project on cyber-infrastructure for community detection in large networks (2024-2027), a PPoSS LARGE grant on scalable graph algorithms (2023-2028), and an Insper-Illinois collaboration on meso-scale structures in large graphs (2023-2028). She is organizing a workshop on large-scale phylogenetics at the NSF-funded Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation in August 2025.

She advises graduate students in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, with a preference for students who have taken her courses and demonstrated strong programming skills. Her research group focuses on the intersection of graph algorithms, machine learning, and biological applications.