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/ |
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.
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.
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] Her more recent research has studied issues of nondeterminism and undecidability in self-assembly,[6] 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.[7][8]
Kari won the Rolf Nevanlinna doctoral thesis award for the best Finnish mathematics doctoral thesis in 1991.[9][10]From 2002 to 2011, she held a Canada Research Chair in Biocomputing.[11]