Lila Kari

[1][2] She came to the University of Western Ontario as a visiting professor in 1993, and by 1996 had been hired there as a tenure-track faculty member.

In the mid-1990s, inspired by an article by Leonard Adleman in Science, she shifted her interests to DNA computing.

[3] In that decade, she also studied theoretical issues relevant to DNA biomollecules such nondeterminism and undecidability in self-assembly.

[6] Since the early 2000s, she has focused on the study of genomic signatures and alignment-free methods for biodiversity informatics.

Her methods use various theoretical concepts such as Chaos Game Representation of DNA genomic sequences, as well as computational tools including supervised and unsupervised machine learning to identify and classify organisms from different species.