Lila Kari field of work DNA computing
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. In her research, together with Laura Landweber, she has initiated  and explored the study of computational power of DNA processing in ciliates, using her expertise to show that the DNA operations performed by genetic recombination in these organisms are Turing complete. Her more recent research has studied issues of nondeterminism and undecidability in self-assembly, 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.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 in Biocomputing.
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