Lila Kari (née Sântean) is a Romanian and Canadian

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

, Canada.

Biography

Professor Kari earned a master's degree at the

University of Bucharest The University of Bucharest (UB) () is a public university, public research university in Bucharest, Romania. It was founded in its current form on by a decree of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza to convert the former Princely Academy of Bucharest, P ...

in 1987, studying there with Gheorghe Păun, and then moved to the

University of Turku The University of Turku (, shortened ''UTU'') is a multidisciplinary public university with eight faculties located in the city of Turku in southwestern Finland. The university also has campuses in Rauma and Pori and research stations in Kevo ...

Finland Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...

for her graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1991 under the supervision of

Arto Salomaa Arto Kustaa Salomaa (6 June 1934 – 26 January 2025) was a Finnish mathematician and computer scientist. His research career, which spanned over 40 years, was focused on formal languages and automata theory. Early life and education Salomaa ...

. She came to the

University of Western Ontario The University of Western Ontario (UWO; branded as Western University) is a Public university, public research university in London, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land, surrounded by residential neighbourhoods and the Thame ...

as a visiting professor in 1993, and by 1996 had been hired there as a tenure-track faculty member.. In 2017 she accepted a position of professor of computer science and University Research Chair at the

Research

Kari's thesis research was in

formal language In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings whose symbols are taken from a set called "alphabet". The alphabet of a formal language consists of symbols that concatenate into strings (also c ...

theory. In the mid-1990s, inspired by an article by

Leonard Adleman Leonard Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist. He is one of the creators of the RSA encryption algorithm, for which he received the 2002 Turing Award. He is also known for the creation of the field of DNA computin ...

in ''

Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

'', she shifted her interests to

DNA computing DNA computing is an emerging branch of unconventional computing which uses DNA, biochemistry, and molecular biology hardware, instead of the traditional electronic computing. Research and development in this area concerns theory, experiments, a ...

. In her research, together with Laura Landweber, she has initiated and explored the study of computational power of DNA processing in

ciliate The ciliates are a group of alveolates characterized by the presence of hair-like organelles called cilia, which are identical in structure to flagellum, eukaryotic flagella, but are in general shorter and present in much larger numbers, with a ...

s, using her expertise to show that the DNA operations performed by

genetic recombination Genetic recombination (also known as genetic reshuffling) is the exchange of genetic material between different organisms which leads to production of offspring with combinations of traits that differ from those found in either parent. In eukaryot ...

in these organisms are

Turing complete Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical comput ...

. In that decade, she also studied theoretical issues relevant to DNA biomollecules such nondeterminism and undecidability in

self-assembly Self-assembly is a process in which a disordered system of pre-existing components forms an organized structure or pattern as a consequence of specific, local interactions among the components themselves, without external direction. When the ...

. Since the early 2000s, she has focused on the study of genomic signatures and alignment-free methods for

biodiversity informatics Biodiversity informatics is the application of informatics (academic field), informatics techniques to biodiversity information, such as Taxonomy (biology), taxonomy, biogeography or ecology. It is defined as the application of information technolog ...

. 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 Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

to identify and classify organisms from different species. A salient application of her work is in the study of genomic signatures of microbial

extremophiles An extremophile () is an organism that is able to live (or in some cases thrive) in extreme environments, i.e., environments with conditions approaching or stretching the limits of what known life can adapt to, such as extreme temperature, pres ...

where she and her team have uncovered evidence suggesting that, besides taxonomic information, environmental information might also be present in genomic signatures.

Awards and honors

Kari won the Rolf Nevanlinna doctoral thesis award for the best Finnish mathematics doctoral thesis in 1991. From 2002 to 2011, she held a

Canada Research Chair Canada Research Chair (CRC) is a title given to certain Canadian university research professors by the Canada Research Chairs Program. Program goals The Canada Research Chair program was established in 2000 as a part of the Government of Canada ...

in Biocomputing. Kari won the 2015 Rozenberg Tulip Award in DNA Computing, which is awarded by the International Society for Nanoscale Science, Computation and Engineering to recognize outstanding achievements in Biomolecular Computing and Molecular Programming.

References

External links

Home page
at University of Waterloo * {{DEFAULTSORT:Kari, Lila Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Canadian computer scientists Romanian emigrants to Canada Canadian people of Romanian descent Romanian computer scientists Canadian women computer scientists Romanian women computer scientists University of Bucharest alumni University of Turku alumni Academic staff of the University of Western Ontario Academic staff of the University of Waterloo Canada Research Chairs DNA nanotechnology people