Lila Kari

Lila Kari (née Santean) is a Romanian and Canadian computer scientist, a professor of computer science and of biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario.

Biography

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 Western Ontario as a visiting professor in 1993, and by 1996 had been hired there as a tenure-track faculty member.[2][3]

While in Finland, Kari married mathematician Jarkko Kari;[4] they divorced, and Jarkko Kari has remained in Finland at the University of Turku.[5]

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.[6] In her research, together with Laura Landweber, she has initiated and explored the study of computational power of DNA processing in ciliates,[7] using her expertise to show that the DNA operations performed by genetic recombination in these organisms are Turing complete.[3] Her more recent research has studied issues of nondeterminism and undecidability in self-assembly,[8] as well as alignment-free methods based on Chaos Game Representation of DNA genomic sequences to identify and classify species based on molecular evidence.[9] [10]

Awards and honors

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

References

  1. ↑ Lila Kari at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. 1 2 Biography on the web site of the Journal of Universal Computer Science. Retrieved February 22, 2012
  3. 1 2 "Biocomputing researcher awarded the Bucke Prize", Western News (University of Western Ontario), March 21, 2002.
  4. ↑ Hamalainen, Anna-Liisa (December 1992), "Tytto joka haluaa kaiken" (PDF), Kodin Kuvalehti (in Finnish): 22–24.
  5. ↑ Staff profile of Jarkko Kari, U. Turku mathematics department. Retrieved September 9, 2011
  6. ↑ "Careers in Nanobiotechnology: Through the Eyes of a Mathematician", Science Careers, February 2, 2001
  7. ↑ Landweber, Laura; Kari, Lila, "The evolution of cellular computing: Nature's solution to a computational problem", Biosystems. 1999 Oct;52(1-3):3-13.
  8. ↑ Adleman, Leonard; Kari, Jarkko; Kari, Lila; Reishus, Dustin; Sosik, Petr, "The Undecidability of the Infinite Ribbon Problem: Implications for Computing by Self-Assembly.", SIAM J. Comput. Volume 38, Issue 6, pp. 2356-2381 (2009).
  9. ↑ Kari, Lila; Hill, Kathleen; Sayem, Abu; Karamichalis, Rallis; Bryans, Nathaniel; Davis, Katelyn; Dattani, Nikesh, "Mapping the Space of Genomic Signatures", PLoS One 10(5): e0119815 (2015).
  10. ↑ Karamichalis, Rallis; Kari, Lila; Konstantinidis, Stavros; Kopecki, Steffen, "An investigation into inter- and intragenomic variations of graphic genomic signatures", BMC Bioinformatics, 16:246 (2015).
  11. ↑ "The Rolf Nevanlinna doctoral thesis award". Archived from the original on November 3, 2005. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
  12. ↑ "Canada Research Chairs: Lila Kari". Archived from the original on May 8, 2014. Retrieved February 22, 2012.

External links

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