Öğr.Gör.Dr. ASLI BOYRAZ

Biyografi

After I finished my Bachelor degree in Mathematics, I wanted to do applied science and I had masters in Informatics in the US. I worked with unstructured text data in my MS thesis and data mining techniques were explored. After I got back home, I have started to work as Instructor in Computer Programming Department in RTE University. Just teaching did not satisfy me, I decided medical area is the best for humanity to use my math and programming background and I chose to do a PhD in Medical Informatics. During my PhD education, I focused on to be a data scientist and I took data science related courses such as data mining and machine learning from computer engineering department. 

For my PhD project, I started to work on microbiome bioinformatics. To focus my research, I visited Science for Life Laboratory at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden with a government scholarship for six months. During my research, I had experience working with R and I explored bioinformatics pipelines. At the beginning of my PhD project, I was involved in a forensic research to solve hospital infection problem. I worked on analyzing a contagion dataset obtained in an intense care unit in order to find the contagion path among objects utilizing microbiome profiles of objects. During my effort of analyzing contagion dataset, I figured out microbiome data should be considered as “compositional data” and I took a course about Compositional Data Analysis from the founders of the Compositional Data Research Group in Spain. Then, we developed a new procedure to analyze microbiome data using compositional data techniques that has a well-founded mathematical background. We proposed a new clustering approach of microbiome data opposed to taxonomic clusters of OTUs/ASVs. This new approach could open new insights in the analysis of microbiome datasets.