Tandy Warnow

Tandy Warnow is the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and also an affiliate in Mathematics, Statistics, Bioengineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and three biology departments.

Warnow's research combines computer science, statistics, and discrete mathematics, focusing on developing improved models and algorithms for reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories in biology and historical linguistics. Her work in biology includes methods for estimating species trees and phylogenetic networks from genome-scale data, addressing heterogeneity in evolutionary histories across. the genome due to incomplete lineage sorting, gene duplication and loss, and horizontal gene transfer. Her methods have been used in estimating species trees for birds, plants, and other groups. Within historical linguistics, she has a long term collaboration with linguist Donald Ringe of the University of Pennsylvania, which has led to advances in understanding how the Indo-European family of languages evolved.

A recent interest is network science, where she develops methods for understanding the community structure in large graphs. She has published more than 200 papers and one textbook. Her national service includes being the lead NSF program officer for BigData (2012-2013) and chairing the BioData Management and Analysis (BDMA) study section at NIH (2010-2012). Warnow was also a member of the Big Data Senior Steering Group of NITRD subcommittee of the National Technology Council (coordinating federal agencies), 2012-2013. She was Co-Chief Scientist of the C3. ai Digital Transformation Institute from 2020-2025. She is the elected Treasurer of the International Society for Computational Biology (2025-2027) and a member of the Board of Directors.

Warnow received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Gene Lawler with committee members Dan Gusfield, Dick Karp, Manuel Blum, and David Gale. She then did postdoctoral training with Simon Tavaré and Michael Waterman at the University of Southern California.