Lila Kari

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

Lila Kari
Citizenship	Romanian; Canadian
Alma mater	University of Bucharest, University of Turku
Known for	Biocomputing, DNA computing
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Academic advisors	Arto Salomaa
Website	https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~lila/

Biography

Professor 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.^[1][2] 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.^[2][3] In 2017 she accepted a position of professor of computer science and University Research Chair at the University of Waterloo.

Research

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.^[4] In her research, together with Laura Landweber, she has initiated and explored the study of computational power of DNA processing in ciliates,^[5] using her expertise to show that the DNA operations performed by genetic recombination in these organisms are Turing complete.^[3] In that decade, she also studied theoretical issues relevant to DNA biomollecules such nondeterminism and undecidability in self-assembly.^[6] Since the early 2000s, she has focused on the study of genomic signatures and alignment-free methods for biodiversity informatics. Her methods use various theoretical concepts such as Chaos Game Representation of DNA genomic sequences, as well as computational tools including supervised and unsupervised machine learning to identify and classify organisms from different species.^[7][8] A salient application of her work is in the study of genomic signatures of microbial extremophiles where she and her team have uncovered evidence suggesting that, besides taxonomic information, environmental information might also be present in genomic signatures.^[9]

Awards and honors

Kari won the Rolf Nevanlinna doctoral thesis award for the best Finnish mathematics doctoral thesis in 1991.^{[10] [11]} From 2002 to 2011, she held a Canada Research Chair in Biocomputing.^[12]

References

1. Lila Kari at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
2. "Biography", Journal of Universal Computer Science, archived from the original on 2020-07-22
3. "Biocomputing researcher awarded the Bucke Prize", Western News, University of Western Ontario, March 21, 2002.
4. "Careers in Nanobiotechnology: Through the Eyes of a Mathematician", Science Careers, February 2, 2001, archived from the original on 2011-08-21
5. Landweber, Laura; Kari, Lila (1999), "The evolution of cellular computing: Nature's solution to a computational problem", Biosystems, 52 (1–3): 3–13, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.297.3259, doi:10.1016/s0303-2647(99)00027-1, PMID 10636025.
6. Adleman, Leonard; Kari, Jarkko; Kari, Lila; Reishus, Dustin; Sosik, Petr (2009), "The Undecidability of the Infinite Ribbon Problem: Implications for Computing by Self-Assembly.", SIAM J. Comput., 38 (6): 2356–2381, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.158.2098, doi:10.1137/080723971.
7. Kari, Lila; Hill, Kathleen; Sayem, Abu; Karamichalis, Rallis; Bryans, Nathaniel; Davis, Katelyn; Dattani, Nikesh (2015), "Mapping the Space of Genomic Signatures", PLOS ONE, 10 (5): e0119815, arXiv:1406.4105, Bibcode:2015PLoSO..1019815K, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0119815, PMC 4441465, PMID 26000734.
8. Karamichalis, Rallis; Kari, Lila; Konstantinidis, Stavros; Kopecki, Steffen (2015), "An investigation into inter- and intragenomic variations of graphic genomic signatures", BMC Bioinformatics, 16: 246, arXiv:1503.00162, Bibcode:2015arXiv150300162K, doi:10.1186/s12859-015-0655-4, PMC 4527362, PMID 26249837.
9. Arias, P.M., Butler, J., Randhawa, G.S. et al. Environment and taxonomy shape the genomic signature of prokaryotic extremophiles. Sci Rep 13, 16105 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-42518-y
10. "The Rolf Nevanlinna doctoral thesis award". Archived from the original on June 23, 2007. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
11. Hamalainen, Anna-Liisa (December 1992), "Tytto joka haluaa kaiken" (PDF), Kodin Kuvalehti (in Finnish): 22–24
12. "Canada Research Chairs: Lila Kari". Archived from the original on May 8, 2014. Retrieved February 22, 2012.

External links

• Home page at University of Waterloo
• Lila Kari publications indexed by Google Scholar