Short Biography

"Not all those who wander are lost."

I am a Post Doctoral scholar at the computer science department, Stanford University, and a Simons Research Fellow at the University of California Berkeley. I am a member of Serafim Batzoglou's Computational Genomics Lab. Before moving to the bay area, I was a Post Doctoral Research Associate of Computing Science and Center for Computational Molecular Biology at Brown University, working under Ben Raphael. I received my B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (software) from Sharif University and my M.Sc. in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University (SFU). In January 2008, I moved to Lab for Computational Biology at SFU under Cenk Sahinalp for my doctoral studies. I defended my Ph.D. thesis on August 1, 2012, with Exceptional Recognition from the external reviewer.

I also completed the PIMS-IGTC in Mathematical Biology program and I was a student collaborator at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. I received an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship (PDF), an NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS-D) and was also supported by the NSERC Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplements Program, which allowed me to visit CWI in the Netherlands. Most recently, I was awarded a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship.

During my Ph.D. studies, I worked at the Genome Sciences department, University of Washington under Evan Eichler and Can Alkan, as a visiting scholar for five months. I also spent two semesters at Bilkent and Sabanci universities in Turkey and University of Durham in England, when both my Ph.D. supervisors took sabbatical leave abroad.