Tandy Warnow received her bachelor of science and PhD degrees in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and 1991, respectively. Warnow is currently the Founder Professor and Associate Head of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In this interview, Warnow describes her childhood, education, prior work at the University of Southern California and University of Texas at Austin, among other institutions, her research in computational phylogenetics and historical linguistics, as well as her professional path that led her to a career computing and as an educator. <strong>