AUSTIN, Texas — Tandy Warnow, professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for developing algorithms that enable an accounting of 3.5 billion years of evolutionary relationships. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation descibes these awards as “intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”

Professor Warnow leads a 16-institution, interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, mathematicians and biologists in the Cyberinfrastructure for Phylogenetic Research (CIPRES) project. Professor Warnow's work will develop novel algorithms and software for phylogeny (evolutionary history) estimation from DNA sequence data. This enables analyses of huge data sets leading to medical, biological, agricultural and pharmaceutical breakthroughs.

Professor Warnow will take an academic leave beginning in the fall of 2010 to work with Professor Bernard Moret of Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne as well as Microsoft Research New England.

Professor Warnow received her Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. She received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award in Science and Engineering in 1996, and was a Radcliffe Fellow for 2003-2004.

For more information, contact Tandy Warnow, Department of Computer Science or visit the CIPRES website at www.phylo.org/.

To view an article written by the College of Natural Sciences, visit http://web5.cns.utexas.edu/news/2010/05/guggenheim-for-warnow/.