Fellowship / Fellows

Tiffani L. Williams

  • 2004–2005
  • Engineering & Computer Science
  • Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow
  • Texas A&M University
Headshot of Tiffani Williams
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Tiffani Williams is interested in developing fast and accurate algorithms to infer the evolutionary history (or phylogeny) for a given set of organisms. During her postdoctoral training at the University of New Mexico, she worked on devising a family of disk-covering methods (DCMs) for the reconstruction of large-scale phylogenies that outperform conventional techniques on both biological and simulated data sets.

At Radcliffe, Williams will develop a unifying framework for phylogenetic analysis that incorporates two components—multiple sequence alignment and phylogeny reconstruction—that for mostly computational reasons are considered separate problems. She has worked on a family of disk-covering methods (DCMs) that improve the performance of phylogeny reconstruction in terms of speed and accuracy. Her integration effort will focus on applying the DCM philosophy concurrently to both problems, leading to the construction of larger and more accurate evolutionary trees.

Williams earned her BS in computer science from Marquette University and PhD in computer science from the University of Central Florida. Afterward, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico in the Department of Computer Science. Starting in fall 2005, Williams will be an assistant professor in computer science at Texas A&M University. Her honors include an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Molecular Biology in 2002 and a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship in 1994.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

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