LILA KARI Professor Department of Computer Science University of Western Ontario London, Ontario Canada N6A 5B7 Tel: +1 519 661 2111 ext. 86894 Fax: +1 519 661 3515 Email: lila "at" csd.uwo.ca Cross-appointed in the Department of Biochemistry, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, UWO

Lila Kari is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Western Ontario. She received her M.Sc. in 1987 from the Univesity of Bucharest, Romania, and her Ph.D. in 1991 for her thesis "On Insertions and Deletions in Formal Languages", for which she received the Nevanlinna Prize for the best mathematics thesis in Finland. Author of more than 170 peer reviewed articles, Professor Kari is widely regarded as one of the world's leading experts in the area of biomolecular computation, that is using biological, chemical and other natural systems to perform computations. She has served as Steering Committee Chair for the DNA Computing conference series, as Steering Committee member for the Unconventional Computation conference series, as well as on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the International Society for Nano-Scale Science and Engineering. She serves on the editorial boards of the journals Theoretical Computer Science, Natural Computing and Universal Computer Science, and as section editor for molecular computing for the upcoming Natural Computing Handbook. She has additionally served as a member of the Board of Directors of the FIELDS Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, the UK EPSRC peer review college, on the NSERC grant selection committee on computing and information systems and the NSERC Herzberg-Brockhouse-Polanyi Prize joint selection committee. At the University of Western Ontario she has received numerous awards, including the Florence Bucke Science Prize and the Faculty of Science Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. From 2002 to 2011 she was Canada Research Chair in Biocomputing, and her current research focusses on theoretical aspects of bioinformation and biocomputation, including models of cellular computation, nanocomputation by DNA self-assembly and Watson-Crick complementarity in formal languages.