Lila Kari

Lila Kari, born Sântean, is a Romanian and Canadian computer scientist and a professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. She earned a master's degree at the University of Bucharest in 1987, studying with Gheorghe Păun, and a PhD at the University of Turku in Finland in 1991 under Arto Salomaa. Her thesis research was in formal language theory; in the mid-1990s, inspired by an article by Leonard Adleman in Science, she shifted to DNA computing and, with Laura Landweber, showed that the DNA operations performed by genetic recombination in ciliates are Turing complete. Since the early 2000s she has studied genomic signatures and alignment-free methods for biodiversity informatics, using Chaos Game Representation and machine learning. She held a Canada Research Chair in Biocomputing from 2002 to 2011 and won the 2015 Rozenberg Tulip Award in DNA Computing.