Rate My Professor Liming Cai

Liming Cai is a Professor of Computer Science and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Computing at the University of Georgia. He earned his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 1994. His research interests encompass algorithms, bioinformatics, probabilistic graphical models, machine learning, machine learning, bioinformatics and health informatics, algorithms and combinatorics, theory of computation, algorithms and complexity, and computational biology. As a key faculty member, he also holds the role of Graduate Coordinator and contributes to the UGA Brain-inspired Artificial Intelligence Team.

Cai has made significant contributions to parameterized complexity and computational biology through his publications. Notable works include 'A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins' published in Nature Ecology & Evolution in 2023; 'On the existence of subexponential parameterized algorithms' in the Journal of Computer and System Sciences in 2003; 'The perfect storm: gene tree estimation error, incomplete lineage sorting, and ancient gene flow explain the most recalcitrant ancient angiosperm clade, Malpighiales' in Systematic Biology in 2021; 'Advice classes of parameterized tractability' in Annals of Pure and Applied Logic in 1997; 'Stochastic modeling of RNA pseudoknotted structures: a grammatical approach' in Bioinformatics in 2003; 'On the parameterized complexity of short computation and factorization' in Archive for Mathematical Logic in 1997; and 'On fixed-parameter tractability and approximability of NP optimization problems' in the Journal of Computer and System Sciences in 1997. His scholarly output has accumulated over 3,200 citations on Google Scholar. In addition, Cai, along with collaborators from Plant Biology and Pharmacy, received a three-year grant from the NSF-DMS/NIH-NIGMS-R01 joint program in Mathematical Biology. He has advised multiple Ph.D. students, including those whose dissertations focused on topics such as maximum spanning k-trees and RNA 3D structures.