Graduate Students
PhD Students
Deniz Ece Kaya | Ece earned her bachelor’s degree in Bioengineering department with a dual degree program 2 years in Montana State University, USA and 2 years in Istanbul Technical University. She completed her master’s degree at Boğaziçi University with a major in Biomedical Engineering.
Currently, she is working with Prof. Ugur SEZERMAN as PhD student at Acibadem University and focus on antibiotic-resistant mechanism, metagenome analysis with big datasets especially microbiome. |
Ege Ülgen | Ege received his MD degree from Acibadem University, School of Medicine in 2015. He has been part of Acibadem University Brain Tumor Research Center since 2012, where he worked on molecular biology of Gliomas. He spent four summers as an intern at Gunel Lab, Department of Neurosurgery, Yale School of Medicine where he also held a postdoctoral research associate position between April 2016 – June 2016.
He is currently working at Sezerman Lab on computational oncology, multi-omics and pathway analyses. |
Elif Arık Sever | Elif received her BSc (2005), MSc (2007) and PhD (2014) degrees from Uludag University in Biology major in Molecular biology. During her MSc and PhD education she worked on yeast genetics and retrotransposons. She worked as an post doctoral researcher in Department of Medical Microbiology in Acibadem University between 2015-2017. She is currently working as a post-doctoral fellow in the department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.
Also she is having her second PhD degree in Sezerman Lab focusing on genomic data and pathway analysis. |
Nogayhan Seymen | Nogay finished his BSc degree in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at Sabanci University in 2013 with a graduation project on zinc fingers. In the summer of 2012, he was an intern at the University of Bologna, under supervision of Prof. Rita Casadio. There, he worked to improve thermostability of cellulases using protein engineering. He then attended the University of Turku in Finland for his MSc degree in Bioinformatics and has developed a phosphorylation predictor using machine learning as part of his thesis.
He is currently a PhD student in Sezerman Lab, focusing on machine learning. |
Tuğçe Bozkurt | Tugce completed her BSc degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics with a minor degree in Psychology at Acibadem University in 2018. In her undergraduate years, she was the investigator of the grant titled “Investigation of the Molecule that Selectively Kills the Hereditary Non-Polyposis Colon Cancer Cells Caused by MSH2 Gene Mutations” supported by TUBITAK 2209-A. Besides, she founded Molecular Biology and Genetics Students’ Club (ACUGEN) at Acibadem University. Then, she has started to work with Prof. Ugur Sezerman and received a MSc degree in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in 2020. During this period, she studied the investigation of disease-causing variants through analyzing the genomic data of patients who have a suspected rare disease. She is currently a PhD student in Sezerman Lab and focusing on the integration of multi-omics data to study etiology of rare diseases. |
Masters Students
Narod Kebabcı | Narod received her BSc degree in Genetics and Bioengineering from Istanbul Bilgi University in 2014. In 2013, she spent her summer break as an intern in the Cellular Programming Laboratory, under the supervision of Prof. Jose Cibelli. There, she worked to identify genes upregulated in the inner cell mass (ICM) of bovine blastocysts. Afterward, she completed her undergraduate thesis with Dr. Yuk Yin Ng on lentiviral integration sites.
She is currently a MSc student in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Acıbadem University. |
Rüçhan Ekren | Rüçhan graduated from Izmir Institute of Technology, Molecular Biology and Genetics at 2016. He did his internship in cholangiocarcinoma research lab with Prof. Dr. med. Ruben Plentz at Universitätsklinikum Tübingen, Germany at 2014. After 4 years of wet-lab experience in a wide-branch of biological sciences; he focused on the analysis of the biological data and started to work in bioinformatics with Assoc. Prof. Jens Allmer at 2016. Rüçhan joined our research group as a master student at August 2017 and he is currently working on computational oncology, transcriptomics, pathway analysis and also improving himself in big data analysis. |
Umut Gerlevik | Umut completed his Bachelor’s Degree at Istanbul Technical University in Molecular Biology and Genetics in 2018 by working on protein-protein interaction surface of BAG1 with RAD23B via in vitro and in silico studies at GD Lab in his graduation project. He did intern at Sezerman Lab between the summer of 2017 and 2018. He has working on prediction of functional impacts of mutations. He created a meta-predictor named PRIDA by machine learning approaches, and improved the structural deficiencies of this predictor via molecular dynamics methods.
Now, he is a Master’s student in Sezerman Lab by working with molecular dynamics simulations and machine learning methods to predict pathogenicity of mutations. |
Zehra Hazal Sezer | Hazal earned her bachelor’s degree in Genetic and Bioinformatics at Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2017. Then, she attended Acibadem University at Istanbul, Turkey for MSc degree in Medical Biotechnology and worked with Prof. Dr. Tanıl KOCAGOZ and his team on developing a new rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing system. In the summer of 2018, she was an intern at Center for Engineering Medicine, MGH, Harvard Medical School. She was involved in two major projects which one of them the elucidation of drug-drug interactions at the transcriptional level. The other project depends on the development of liver-on-chip-disease models, especially NAFLD and NASH.
Currently, she is working with Prof. Ugur SEZERMAN as master student at Acibadem University and focuses on metagenome analysis with big datasets especially microbiome. |