Kimmen Sjölander (née Warnow) is professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Bioengineering.
Sjölander did both her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Department of Computer Science, earning a bachelor's degree in 1993 and a PhD in 1997 under the supervision of David Haussler.
[1] She was the chief scientist in the Molecular Applications Group from 1997-1999 (company co-founded by Michael Levitt) and then principal scientist in Protein Informatics at Celera Genomics from 1999-2001, where she was a member of the team (along with J. Craig Venter and Gene Myers) who assembled and annotated the Human Genome.
[3] Sjölander is most well known for her work in phylogenomic methods for protein sequence analysis, including machine learning methods for functional site prediction and ortholog identification, and hidden Markov model (HMM) methods for protein structure prediction, functional subfamily and ortholog classification, remote homology detection, multiple sequence alignment, and phylogenetic tree estimation.
Sjölander's twin sister Tandy Warnow is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.