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Abstract: Estimating the Tree of Life is one of the grand computational challenges in science and has applications to many areas of science and biomedical research. Despite intensive research over the past several decades, many problems remain inadequately solved. In this talk, I will discuss species tree estimation from genome-scale datasets. In addition, I will describe these problems and what is understood about these them from a mathematical perspective. Furthermore, I will identify some of the open problems in this area where mathematical research, drawing from graph theory, combinatorial optimization, and probability and statistics, is needed.  This talk will be accessible to mathematicians, computer scientists, probabilists and statisticians, and does not require any knowledge of biology.

 Brief biosketch: Tandy Warnow is the Founder Professor of Computer Science, a member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, an affiliate in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and in the departments of Mathematics, Statistics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Animal Biology, Entomology, and Plant Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Tandy received her PhD in Mathematics in 1991 at the University of California at Berkeley under the direction of Eugene Lawler.  She received postdoctoral training with Simon Tavaré and Michael Waterman at the University of Southern California from 1991-1992, and at Sandia National Laboratories from 1992-1993. Tandy was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania from 1994-1999 and at the University of Texas from 1999-2014, before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois in 2014. Tandy received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award in Science and Engineering in 1996, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 2006, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for 2011.  She was elected a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2015 and of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2017. Her research combines mathematics, computer science, and statistics to develop improved models and algorithms for reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories in both biology and historical linguistics.   Her current research focuses on phylogeny and alignment estimation for very large datasets (10,000 to 1,000,000 sequences), estimating species trees and phylogenetic networks from collections of gene trees, and metagenomics. Link to personal webpage

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