Lila Kari

Lila Kari (née Santean) is a Romanian and Canadian computer scientist, professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Kari earned a master's degree at the University of Bucharest in 1987, studying there with Gheorghe Păun, and then moved to the University of Turku in Finland for her graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1991 under the supervision of Arto Salomaa. While in Finland, Kari married mathematician Jarkko Kari; they divorced, and Jarkko Kari has remained in Finland at the University of Turku. She came to the University of Western Ontario as a visiting professor in 1993, and by 1996 had been hired there as a tenure-track faculty member. In 2017 she accepted a position of professor of computer science and University Research Chair at the University of Waterloo.

Kari's thesis research was in formal language theory. In the mid-1990s, inspired by an article by Leonard Adleman in Science, she shifted her interests to DNA computing. In her research, together with Laura Landweber, she has initiated and explored the study of computational power of DNA processing in ciliates, using her expertise to show that the DNA operations performed by genetic recombination in these organisms are Turing complete. Her more recent research has studied issues of nondeterminism and undecidability in self-assembly, as well as studies of biodiversity informatics, such as proposing alignment-free methods based on Chaos Game Representation of DNA genomic sequences to identify and classify species.

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