Alumni « Sezerman Lab

Alumni

If you are an alumni of Sezerman Lab, you can update your details and/or photo by e-mailing nogay{at}sabanciuniv{dot}edu.

Graduate Alumni

Ahmet Sinan Yavuz	Sinan received his BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University in 2011. He held a research assistant position between June 2010 and October 2010 in BAMM Labs, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. He completed his undergraduate thesis in Sezerman Lab at 2011 on protein family classification using structural and sequence motifs. Following his BSc, Sinan has been accepted into MSc in Bioinformatics and Theoretical Systems Biology program at Imperial College London, London, UK. During his masters, he worked on genome-wide exploration of transcriptional regulatory sequences in A. gambiae using genetic algorithms, defining protein networks regulating cell-cell adhesion using data mining techniques, and an internet based application for the integrative analysis of copy number aberration and gene expression data sets. He was graduated on Spring 2017 from PhD program in Molecular Biology, Genetics and Bioengineering at Sabanci University, with a dissertation titled “Predictive analysis of conditional epigenetic variability”. He is currently working at Seven Bridges Genomics as a Bioinformatics Scientist.
Baran Canpolat	Baran received his BSc degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Bilkent University in 2011. He was graduated from Sezerman Lab in 2015 with a MSc degree with his thesis titled: “Covalent Modification of Cellulases for Textile Biofinishing”. He is currently working at Sanofi Pasteur as a Project Management Officer.
Barış Binay	Barış received his BSc degree in Chemistry from Ankara University in 2002. He then received his MSc degree in Molecular Biology, Genetics and Biotechnology from Istanbul Technical University in 2006 and his PhD degree in same field from Istanbul Technical University in 2012. During his PhD, he worked as a researcher in Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre, under supervision of Prof. N. J. Turner and then he finished his PhD thesis titled “Development of Novel Biocatalysts for Industrial Applications” under supervision of Doç. Dr. Nevin Gül Karagüler from Istanbul Technical and Prof. N. J. Turner from Manchester University. Currently, he is a faculty member at Gebze Technical University.
Batuhan O. Yenilmez	Batuhan received his BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University in 2011. He held a research assistant position between June 2010 and October 2010 in Rader Lab, Insititute of Translational Medicine at UPenn, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Afterwards, he completed his undergraduate thesis also in Sezerman Lab on development of microarray systems for enzymatic reactions and its usage on screening random mutagenesis libraries. After completing his BSc, Batu has been accepted into MSc in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering program at Sabanci University with a full scholarship. He completed his MSc thesis titled “Generation of novel random mutagenesis lipase libraries via directed evolution” on September 2013. He is currently working as a PhD candidate at UMass Medical School.
Buğra Özer	Buğra received his BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University in 2011. He held a research assistant position between June 2010 and September 2010 in Gumus Lab, Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medical College, New York City, NY, USA. Afterwards, he completed his undergraduate thesis also in Sezerman Lab on protein family classification using structural and sequence motifs. After completing his BSc, Bugra has been accepted into MSc in Bioinformatics at Kings College, London, UK with King’s International Graduate Scholarship. During his masters, he worked on meta-analysis of neurological disorders. Buğra completed his PhD thesis, titled “Exploration of Methylation Driven Mechanisms in Cancer”, on April 2016. He is currently working as a Bioinformatics Officer in The Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK.
Burcu Bakır-Güngör	Burcu Bakır-Güngör received her B.Sc. degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabancı University in İstanbul, Turkey; her M.Sc. degree in Bioinformatics from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA; and her PhD degree from Georgia Institute of Technology/Sabancı University under the supervision of Ugur Sezerman. She worked at the Bioinformatics Research Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA, from 2007-2009. From 2009 to 2011, she worked at the Department of Computer Engineering, Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, Turkey. Then, she worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Genetics and Bioinformatics at Bahçeşehir University. Since November 2012, she works at the Advanced Genomics and Bioinformatics Research Center, UEKAE, TÜBİTAK, Kocaeli, Turkey. She is the recipient of “Best Paper” Award at EvoBIO 2006. Her research interests include bioinformatics, computational genomics, network and pathway oriented analysis of genome-wide association studies and next-generation sequencing datasets; and applications of machine learning, data mining and pattern recognition in bioinformatics. Currently, she is a faculty member at Abdullah Gül University.
Cem Meydan	Cem recieved his BSc degree in Computer Engineering from Izmir Institute of Technology in 2007. He completed his PhD thesis titled “Discovering Discriminative and Class-Specific Sequence and Structural Motifs in Proteins” in 2013. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, NY, USA.
Ceren Saygı	Ceren received her BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering with Chemistry minor from Sabancı University in 2008. She held a research assistant position between June 2007 and October 2007 in Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Munich, Germany. She completed her undergraduate and master thesis in Sayers Lab at 2010 on durum wheat metallothionein mutants and their biophysical characterization using small-angle X-ray scattering. Following her MSc, she held another research assistant position between May 2011 and November 2011 in Max Planck Institute of Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany. She was graduated on December 2018 with a dissertation titled “Functional enrichment methodology for analyzing omics data to study the aetiology of rare diseases”. She is currently working as a post-doctoral fellow at the Bioinformatics Core Facility of University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany.
Emel Durmaz	Emel received her BSc degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Middle East Technical University in 2007 and her PhD degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University in 2012. She continues post-doctoral research in Sezerman Lab and is currently interested in experimental and computational methods to understand enzyme mechanisms.
Günseli Bayram Akçapınar	Günseli recieved her BSc degree in Nolecular Biology and Genetics from Bogazici University in 2003. In her graduation project, she worked on the Molecular Analysis of Presenilin 1 and 2 genes in two Turkish families with Early Onset Familial Alzheimer’s Disease with Prof. A. Nazli Basak and Asst. Prof. M. Baki Yokes. She received her MSc and Ph.D. in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University in 2005 and 2011, respectively. She worked on the covalent modification, molecular modeling and protein engineering of cellulases for textile biofinishing with Prof. O. Ugur Sezerman. She worked as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Sezerman Lab until 2013. She is working on the cloning, production, characterisation, molecular modeling and protein engineering of the cellulases from Trichoderma reesei and Clostridium thermocellum in the methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris for textile applications and biofuel production. Currently, she is a post-doctoral fellow at TU Wien.
Hazal Yılmaz	Hazal received his BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University in 2012. She held a research assistant position between June 2011 and September 2011 in Ya-Ming Hou Lab, Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Afterwards, she completed her undergraduate thesis also in Sezerman Lab on a new approach to enhance temperature stability of a Bacillus thermocatenulatus lipase. After completing his BSc, Hazal has been accepted into MSc in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering program at Sabanci University with a full scholarship. She has been graduated from Sezerman Lab in January 2014 with her thesis titled: “Modifications on Protein Termini of Bacillus thermocatenulatus Lipase and Their Impacts on Activity and Stability”. In her spare time, Hazal is interested in playing flute in a band, and reading novels. Currently, she is a PhD student at Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland.
Murat Can Çobanoğlu	Murat Can received his BSc degree and MSc degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Sabanci University in 2008, and 2010 respectively. He received his PhD in Bahar Lab at Joint Carnegie Mellon University-University of Pittsburgh Computational Biology PhD Program.
Serkan Sırlı	Serkan received his BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University in 2012. He held a research assistant position between June 2011 and September 2011 in Chernoff Lab, School of Biology at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. Afterwards, he completed his undergraduate thesis also in Sezerman Lab on enhancing the temperature stability of a Bacillus thermocatenulatus lipase. After completing his BSc, Serkan has been accepted into MSc in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering program at Sabanci University with a full scholarship. He completed his MSc thesis titled “Investigations on the N-linked glycosylation of Aspergillus niger Lipase in Pichia pastoris. He lost 22 kgs during his thesis writing and he is currently unemployed.
Sofia Piepoli	Sofia is an Italian student that received her Bachelor Degree in Biological Science from the University of Lecce in December 2011 with an experimental thesis in Plant Biology. This work was about the co-localization of a small transport molecule, SYP51, in the subcellular compartments of Arabidobsis thaliana with the TGN marker Rab11a. Afterwards, she was accepted to a Master Course in Bioinformatics at the University of Bologna. She joined Sezerman Lab in February 2013 as an Erasmus Student. Sofia completed her masters thesis on Enzyme Family Classification with Prof.Sezerman in June 2013.

Alper Küçükural	Aslı Çalık	Aydın Albayrak	Ceyda Sol
Ebru Kaymak	Ebru Şahin	Ece Egemen	Eda Barlak
Elanur Şireli	Ersin Başaran	Fatma Uzbaş	Galip Gürkan Yardımcı
Mutlu Doğruel	Onur Yükselen	Özgür Gül	Pelin Akan
Sedef Dinçer	Süveyda Yeniterzi	Tuğrul Tekbulut	Yasemin Türkeli
Yasin Bakış	Zerrin Işık

Undergraduate Alumni

Begüm Topçuoğlu	Begüm has graduated with BSc in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University at 2011. She is currently a PhD student in Microbiology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA.
Bilge Sağnak	Bilge was a computer engineering student of computer graphics and interactive technologies mostly working on 3D modeling and animation while also focusing on bioinformatics since spring 2010. Bilge is a computer engineering student of computer graphics and interactive technologies mostly working on 3D modeling and animation while also focusing on bioinformatics since spring 2010.
Bora Uyar	Bora has graduated with a BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering Program from Sabanci University in 2008. Then he moved to Vancouver/Canada and finished his MSc in 2010 as a scholar of CIHR/MSFHR Training Program in Bioinformatics in the department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Simon Fraser University. Currently, he is undertaking a PhD in Structural and Computational Biology Unit at European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg/Germany.
Deniz Yörükoğlu	Deniz has graduated with a BSc degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Sabanci University at 2009. Afterwards, he received his MSc degree from Simon Fraser University. He is currently a PhD student in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dicle Yalçın	Dicle received her B.Sc. degree in Genetics and Bioengineering from Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey. She is currently a PhD student in University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA. Dicle joined to Sezerman Lab for her internship in Summer 2013 and she completed her graduation thesis with Prof. Sezerman.
Duygu Soysal	Duygu received her B.Sc. degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey. At the end of her sophomore year in 2010, she started to work at Enzyme Engineering and Bioinformatics Group, Sezerman Lab, Sabancı University as an undergraduate researcher. She has involved in two research projects related to high throughput cloning & expression, lipase engineering via rational design and functional characterization of the recombinant lipases. At the end of her junior year in 2011, she worked as a summer intern at University of Pennsylvania, Department of Biology, Daldal Lab. The research she was involved in UPENN focuses on the copper transport and insertion into the cbb3 type cytochrome c oxidase (cbb3-Cox) in the facultative photosynthetic model organism R. capsulatus. Her senior graduation project in Sezerman Lab was a new approach to enhance temperature stability of a lipase. The project contributes to the knowledge of thermostability and also presents tools to modify stability in terms of structural re-arrangements. Currently, she is a graduate student in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at Sabancı University (SU) and working in the laboratory of Prof. Huveyda Basaga.
Eylül Harputlugil	Eylül has graduated with a BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University. She is currently a PhD student in Biological Sciences in Public Health at Harvard University.
Melis Mengütay	Melis has graduated with a BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University in 2011. Currently, she is a graduate student in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at Sabancı University (SU) and working in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Ismail Cakmak.
Özgün Erdoğan	Özgün has graduated with BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University at 2007. She is currently a PhD student in Biochemistry and Biophysics at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Serdar Çakıcı	Serdar has graduated with a BSc degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Sabanci University. He is currently a software developer at a private firm.
Tevfik H. Kitapçı	Tevfik has graduated with a BSc degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Sabanci University at 2010. He is currently a PhD student in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at University of South California.
Tural Aksel	Tural has graduated with a BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University in 2006. He is currently a PhD student in Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University.
Yücel Nalbantoğlu	Yücel has graduated with a BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from Sabanci University in 2011. He is currently a MSc student at Biotechnology program in University of Helsinki, Finland.

Akdes Serin	Altuna Akalın	Azime Akman	Başak Arslan
Burcu Güven	Erem Kazancıoğlu	Gizem Gezici	Gülden Sarıcalı
Güzin Tunca	Hilal Koşucu	İdil Orhon	İdil Ulengin
İnci Ökten	İrem Gürbüz	Mehmet Yalıman	Nilgün Dönmez
Öznur Taştan	Rezarta Islamaj	Selen Uğurlu	Serdar Kadıoğlu
Sevcan Temel	Tolga Soykan	Zeynep Kasap

Intern Alumni

Çağla Çetin	Çağla is an undergraduate student from Istanbul University, currently studying Molecular Biology and Genetics. She is interested in Molecular Bioinformatics. Çağla joined to Sezerman Lab for her internship in Summer 2013.
Rabia Şen	Rabia is an undergraduate student from İstanbul University, currently studying Molecular Biology and Genetics. She joined to Sezerman Lab for her internship in Summer 2014.
Samed Susam	Samed is an undergraduate student from Stanford University, currently studying Bioengineering. He is interested in synthetic bioengineering and neuroengineering. Samed joined to Sezerman Lab for his internship in Summer 2013.
Çağlayan Taybaş	Çağlayan is an undergraduate student from Izmir Institute of Technology, currently studying Molecular Biology and Genetics. Çağlayan joined to Sezerman Lab for his internship in Winter 2014.
Süleyman Selim Çınaroğlu	Selim is an undergraduate student from Istanbul University, currently studying Molecular Biology and Genetics. Selim joined to Sezerman Lab for his internship in Winter 2014.
Veli Kaan Aydın	Kaan is an undergraduate student from Ege University, currently studying Bioengineering. He joined to Sezerman Lab for his internship in Summer 2014.