On 14 September 2021 the Italian chapter of EATCS awarded a prize for the Best Italian PhD Thesis in Theoretical Computer Science ex aequo to Giulia Bernardini (CWI/Life Sciences group) and Francesco Dagnino (University of Genova).
Giulia obtained the prize for her thesis "Combinatorial Methods for the Analysis of Related Genomic Sequences". The main goal of her work is to develop new algorithmic frameworks to deal with (i) a convenient representation of a set of similar genomes and (ii) phylogenetic data, with particular attention to the increasingly accurate tumor phylogenies. As both these kinds of biological data have only recently become available, several fundamental questions have not been fully resolved yet. Some of such questions are successfully addressed in the thesis, with a focus on the most theoretical aspects.
The European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) is an international organization founded in 1972. Its aim is to facilitate the exchange of ideas and results among theoretical computer scientists as well as to stimulate cooperation between the theoretical and the practical community in computer science. Its activities include the annual organization of the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP).
