Nurcan Tuncbag

Biography

Dr. Tuncbag is an associate professor at Koç University jointly in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and School of Medicine. She received her undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ), and her master’s and doctorate degrees from Koç University Computational Sciences and Engineering department. She did her post-doctoral research in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Biological Engineering Department between 2010-2014. She carried out her academic studies at Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ) between 2014-2021.
Her work in computational systems biology and bioinformatics has been recognized by the national TÜBA-GEBİP, BA-BAGEP, Parlar Foundation, UNESCO-L’Oreal National, TÜSEB young researcher awards, and ODTÜ faculty performance awards. In 2019, she was selected for the International Rising Talent award by UNESCO-L’Oreal Foundation. She has been a member of the Global Young Academy since 2020.
Her research interests are computational systems biology, bioinformatics, network-based medicine, network modeling, multi-omic data integration, single-cell and bulk omic data analysis, and discovery of latent cancer driver mutations. She continues her research how the interaction networks between proteins and genes are altered in diseases by using multi-omic data integration and computational techniques.

Selected Publications:

Paraskevopoulou F., Parvizi P., Senger G., Tuncbag N., Rosenmund C., Yildirim F. Impaired inhibitory GABAergic synaptic transmission and gene transcription studied in single neurons by Patch-seq in Huntington’s disease, PNAS, accepted.
Dincer C, Kaya T, Keskin O, Gursoy A, Tuncbag N. (2019) 3D spatial organization and network-guided comparison of mutation profiles in Glioblastoma reveals similarities across patients. PLOS Computational Biology. 15(9):e1006789. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006789.
Tuncbag N, Milani P, Pokorny JL, Johnson H, Sio TT, Dalin S, Iyekegbe DO, White F, Sarkaria JN, Fraenkel E (2016) Network Modeling Identifies Patient-specific Pathways in Glioblastoma, Scientific Reports, 6:28668. doi: 10.1038/srep28668.
Tuncbag N, Gosline SJC, Kedaigle A, Soltis AR, Gitter A, Fraenkel E. Network-based interpretation of diverse high-throughput datasets through the Omics Integrator software package, PLOS Comp Bio, 2016, 12(4):e1004879. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004879.
Tuncbag N, Braunstein A, Pagnani A, Huang SSC, Chayes J, Borgs C, Zecchina R, Fraenkel E. Simultaneous reconstruction of multiple signaling pathways via the prize-collecting Steiner forest problem, Journal of Computational Biology, 2013, 20, pp. 1-13.