Tandy Warnow
| Tandy Warnow | |
|---|---|
| Fields | computer science, biology |
| Institutions |
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of Pennsylvania University of Texas |
| Education | University of California, Berkeley (bachelor,1984; Ph.D.,1991) |
| Doctoral advisor | Eugene Lawler |
| Other academic advisors | Michael Waterman and Simon Tavare |
| Notable students | Luay Nakhleh |
| Notable awards |
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Website http://tandy.cs.illinois.edu/ |
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Tandy Warnow is an American computer scientist, the Founder Professor of Engineering (and Professor of Bioengineering and Computer Science) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is known for her work on the reconstruction of evolutionary trees, both in biology and in historical linguistics, and also for multiple sequence alignment methods.
Warnow did both her undergraduate and graduate studies in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a bachelor's degree in 1984 and a Ph.D. in 1991 under the supervision of Eugene Lawler. After postdoctoral studies at the University of Southern California from 1991-1992 (postdoctoral supervisors Michael Waterman and Simon Tavare) and at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque from 1992-1993, she took a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, where she remained until moving in 1999 to the University of Texas. In 2014, Warnow joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where she is the Founder Professor of Engineering. Warnow has joint positions in the Departments of Computer Science and Bioengineering.
Warnow's mother was noted archivist Joan Warnow-Blewett, and her father was Morton Warnow, the son of the band leader Mark Warnow and nephew of the composer Raymond Scott. Her twin sister is Kimmen Sjolander, a bioinformatics researcher and faculty member at the University of California. She is married to George Chacko.
In 1995, research by Warnow, Donald Ringe, and Ann Taylor at the University of Pennsylvania based on perfect phylogeny computations provided a comprehensive theory for the timing of the early subdivisions in the Indo-European languages. Their computations lent support to the Indo-Hittite hypothesis according to which the first of these subdivisions to separate from the rest of the Indo-European languages were the Anatolian languages. Their results also support the Graeco-Armenian hypothesis, according to which the Armenian language and Greek language form a subfamily of Indo-European. They fit the Germanic languages into the evolutionary tree of Indo-European languages, previously considered problematic, by hypothesizing that the Proto-Germanic language was closely related to the Balto-Slavic languages but then became modified by westward migrations of the Germanic tribes which led them into contact with Italic and Celtic speakers. This perfect phylogeny approach was later extended by Warnow and colleagues to allow for undetected borrowing between languages, so that language evolution is modelled with a network rather than a tree.
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