Lenore J. Cowen PhD

Dr. Lenore J. Cowen is a 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 (now the Applied Mathematics and Statistics department) at Johns Hopkins University where she was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2000. Dr. Cowen was named an ONR Young Investigator and a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. 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's research interests span three areas: Discrete Mathematics (since high school), Algorithms (since 1991 in graduate school) and most recently Computational Molecular Biology, where she focuses on predicting protein function from structural and biological network information. She led a team that won the DREAM Disease Module Identification challenge in 2016. She is on the Editorial Board of the IEEE/ACM Transactions of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB) and an Associate Editor of the journal Bioinformatics(from Oxford University press). In 2020, she was awarded both the CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award from the Computing Research Association, and the NCWIT Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award from the National Center for Women and Information Technology.