Lenore Cowen is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Mathematics. After finishing her Ph.D. in mathematics at MIT 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. She joined Tufts in 2001. Her research interests span three areas: discrete mathematics, algorithms, and computational molecular biology. She is the director of T-TRIPODS, an institute that brings together a cross-disciplinary team of faculty in mathematics, computer science, and electrical and computer engineering who develop and share their expertise in data science with faculty and students in fields outside their own.