Lenore J. Cowen



 

Dr. Lenore J. Cowen is  an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department  at Tufts University. She also has a courtesy appointment in the Tufts Mathematics Department. She received a BA in Mathematics from Yale and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from  MIT.  After finishing her Ph.D. in 1993, she was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow and then joined the faculty of the Mathematical Sciences department at Johns Hopkins University where she was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2000. Lured by the Boston area, and the prospect of making an impact in a growing young department, she joined Tufts in September, 2001. Dr. Cowen has been named an ONR Young Investigator and a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.   Her research interests span three areas: Discrete Mathematics (since high school), Algorithms (since 1991 in graduate school) and Computational Molecular Biology (since 2000). She is on the editorial boards of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics and of SIAM Review.


Contact Information



US Mail:                       Email: cowen at cs.tufts.edu
CS Department               
Tufts University               Phone: +1-617-627-5134
161 College Avenue             
Medford, MA 02155                Fax: +1-617-627-3220
U.S.A.                           

New 12/13/06: confirmation that some email is getting eaten by CS department spam filters. While this is being worked on, if you didn't hear back from me, PLEASE try my alternate email address.
You can also reach me at firstname.lastname at gmail.com


Teaching

Spring 2008 I am teaching Algorithms.

Fall 2007 I am teaching one of my favorite courses: Graph Theory.

Please note that the course links below point to the course web page for the *current* semester at Tufts, i.e. if it's a previous year, and I wasn't the last to teach it, you are going to be looking at the homepage for someone else's version of the class.

In Fall 2006, I taught Algorithms and an advanced topics seminar in Computational Biology.

In Spring 2006 I taught an introductory course in Cryptography

In Fall 2005 I taught Combinatorial Optimization

In Fall 2004 I taught Computational Biology (I also co-taught this class in Fall of 2002. )

Spring 2004 and Spring 2002 I taught an Advanced Algorithms class. Here's a little blurb.

Spring 2003 and Spring 2005 I taught and co-taught Theory of Computing

Fall 2002 I taught: Cryptography and Security and

Fall 2001 I taught COMP 15: Data Structures in C++.

Here are the classnotes for two of the graduate courses I taught at Hopkins: Approximation Algorithms and The Probabilistic Method.


Research


What I work on

First is this really the page you are looking for? Perhaps you are more interested in my compbio research. In which case you should go directly to my Computational Biology Group homepage.

Othewise, I would say that my research interests are probably far too broad for my own good. I have inherited my advisor's love of good problems, wherever they be found. Exploiting locality and approximate distance have been persistent themes, even across catagories, for example they have been used in our approach both to routing and to classification and clustering problems. Now I am finding that my work on networks and graph algorithms may have some interesting synergies with computational biology and functional genomics. Research interests include:

My research in approximate routing is funded by NSF grant CCR0208629 and portions of my computational biology research are currently being funded by Large ITR grant with me as the Tufts PI and Simon Kasif of BU as the main PI.

My Ph.D. advisor was Daniel J. Kleitman ; my Ph.D. students to date were Christine Cheng (JHU/1999), 1/2 Christopher Wagner (JHU/1999), and Adam Cannon (JHU/2000). My current PhD students are Arthur Brady (Tufts/expected 2008), Guangtao Ge (Tufts) and Anoop Kumar. A fairly complete list of co-authors can be found here (My Erdos number is 2 (but so is everyone else's)).


Projects


Selected Preprints