Committees

Ugur Sezerman Professor, Acibadem University

Uğur Sezerman graduated from Bogazici University and he holds a Ph.D. from Boston University, Biomedical Engineering. He is specialized in structural bioinformatics, protein engineering, computational genome analysis, personalized medicine and systems biology. He gave lectures and continued research at Boston University and Bogazici University. He has worked at Sabanci University where he has established the Computational Biology Laboratory and Protein Engineering Laboratory from September 1999 till March 2015. Currently, he is working as a researcher and an instructor at Acibadem University.

Ezgi Karaca Dr., IBG & Dokuz Eylul University

Ezgi Karaca currently works as an Assistant professor at Izmir Biomedicine and Genome Center (Turkey) where she is the Principal Investigator of Karaca Lab. Her research in computational structural biology focuses on integrative modeling, protein dynamics, physical principles of biomolecular interactions by determining (and/or dissecting) the structures of biomolecular complexes as well as developing various computational tools, such as docking, homology modeling, and molecular dynamics. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow (2013-2016) in EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) and selected for the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship in 2014, for her research on Molecular Basis of Ribosomal RNA Methylation. Dr. Ezgi Karaca awarded with Young Scientist Award (BAGEP) by Science Academy (Turkey) and Installation Grant by EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) in 2020. She became a member of the Turkish Medical Informatics Association (TURKMIA) in 2018. Dr. Ezgi Karaca received her BS and MS in chemical engineering from Bogazici University (Turkey), and her PhD in chemistry from Utrecht University (Netherlands).

Elif Nur Firat-Karalar Dr., Koc University

Elif Nur Fırat Karalar currently works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Koç University (Istanbul, Turkey). Her studies mainly focus on cell biology, cancer research, developmental biology including biology of centrosomes, cilia and microtubules. Previously, she worked as a post-doctoral scholar in Department of Biology in Stanford University (United States) and as a graduate student in Department of Molecular and Cell Biology in University of California (United States). Dr. Fırat-Karalar was awarded with Women In Science Award by LOREAL UNESCO in 2015 and was selected as one of the 27 EMBO Young Investigators in 2019, where she became the first scientist to be selected to the EMBO YIP program from Turkey. She is also a member of The American Society for Cell Biology (2008-present) and Molecular Biology Association of Turkey (2014-present). Dr. Fırat-Karalar received her BS in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Bilkent University (Turkey), and her PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from University of California (United States).

Fran Supek Professor, IRB Barcelona

Fran Supek is an ICREA Research Professor at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona, Spain), where he leads the Genome Data Science laboratory. His research focuses on large-scale statistical analyses of genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic data. Dr. Supek received his BS and MS (integrated) in biology from the University of Zagreb (Croatia), and his PhD in molecular biology from the University of Zagreb (Croatia). Then, he became a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG Barcelona, Spain) as a Marie Curie fellow. Dr. Supek is an EMBO Young Investigator and the PI of the ERC Starting Grant in 2017.

Ana Cvejic Dr., University of Cambridge

Dr. Ana Cvejic is a Principle Investigator at the Department of Haematology, University of Cambridge and an Honorary Faculty member at the Sanger Institute. Her research focuses on the genes and mechanisms behind haematopoietic stem cell (HSC) differentiation. Dr. Cvejic received her MS in Molecular Biology and Physiology at University of Belgrade and her PhD in Biochemistry at University of Bristol. She then joined University of Cambridge/Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute for a postdoctoral fellowship. In 2012, Dr. Cvejic was awarded with a Cancer Research UK Career Development Fellowship. She was awarded with ERC Starting Grant in 2016 and EMBO Young Investigator Award in 2017.

Janet Thornton Director Emeritus of EMBL-EBI and Senior Scientist, EMBL-EBI

Professor Dame Janet Thornton is Director Emeritus of the European Bioinformatics Institute and a senior scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). Her research focuses on understanding protein structure and function, and their effects on disease and ageing using highly interdisciplinary approaches. Thornton's work contributed significantly to understanding protein three-dimensional structure. She is the author of popular tools and databases that are used in academia as well as pharmaceutical companies. Professor Thornton is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a member of EMBO and a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Igor Jouline Professor, Ohio State University

Igor B. Jouline is the Rod Sharp Endowed Professor in the Department of Microbiology and a Co-Director of Computational Health and Life Sciences at The Ohio State University Translational Data Analytics Institute. His research focuses on the evolution of genes, including those implicated in various diseases. Dr. Jouline was a Wellcome Trust Fellow at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) and a Distinguished Staff Member at the US Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He served as a Chair of the International Odysseus Jury (Belgian Research Foundation) and several review panels at the National Institutes of Health. He was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology in 2017 and became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019. Dr. Jouline received his BS in biology and MS in biophysics from Saratov State University (Russia), and his PhD in microbiology from St. Petersburg State University (Russia).

Sunduz Keles Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Sunduz Keles is Professor of Statistics and of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and her team are also affiliated with the Computation and Informatics in Biology and Medicine (CIBM) Program and Genome Center of Wisconsin. Professor Keles's research interests broadly include statistical genomics with specific focus on high dimensional genomic, high throughput sequencing experiments and biomedical data. Their reseach concerns developing and applying statistical methods for problems and the fundamentals of gene regulation in development and disease that arise in genome biology. She received her Ph.D. in Biostatistics of University of California-Berkeley in 2003. In 2007, Professor Keles was awarded with PhRMA Foundation Award in Informatics and H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship in 2012.