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 masters 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, she has studied the computational power of DNA processing in ciliates,[7] using her expertise in formal languages 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.

Awards and honors

Kari won the Rolf Nevanlinna doctoral thesis award for the best Finnish mathematics doctoral thesis in 1991.[8] From 2002 to 2011, she held a Canada Research Chair in Biocomputing.[9]

References

  1. ↑ Lila Kari at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Biography on the web site of the Journal of Universal Computer Science. Retrieved February 22, 2012
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "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", 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. ↑ Siegfried, Tom (March 1, 1999), "Life by the numbers: Computing critter is pioneer of sorts", Dallas Morning News.
  8. ↑ "The Rolf Nevanlinna doctoral thesis award". Archived from the original on November 3, 2005. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
  9. ↑ "Canada Research Chairs: Lila Kari". Archived from the original on May 8, 2014. Retrieved February 22, 2012.

External links