Speaker: Dr. Cenk Sahinalp, Canada Research Chair in Computational Genomics, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University
As biomolecular networks, and in particular protein-protein interaction networks, become more and more available it becomes of significant interest to emulate them via random processes, to compare them and detect their similarities under various measures, to determine some of their interesting topological features and to identify network motifs of interest. All of these problems are computationally hard and thus require novel algorithmic strategies towards their resolution. In
this talk we will discuss some of these algorithmic challenges and hopefully present a few success stories.
About the speaker:
S. Cenk Sahinalp studied Electrical Engineering at
Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, and got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park. After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Sahinalp first worked at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, as a staff member and then at University of Warwick as a faculty. During his time at Warwick he was also affiliated with the Center for BioInformatics, University of Pennsylvania and frequently visited
DIMACS, Bell Labs, and AT&T Research. In 1999 he joined Case Western Reserve University as an assistant professor of computer science. There Dr. Sahinalp became a founding member of Center for Computational Genomics, an adjunct faculty at the Department of Genetics, Case School of Medicine and Ireland Cancer Center of the University Hospitals. In 2003 he moved to Vancouver as a Canada Research Chair in Computational Genomics at Simon Fraser University. At
SFU Dr. Sahinalp directs the Lab for Computational Biology. He is also a faculty member in
MSFHR-
CIHR funded Bioinformatics Training Program. Dr. Sahinalp’s research focuses on biomolecular sequence analysis,
RNA structure and interaction prediction, topological properties of biomolecular networks and more recently, small molecule classification and search.
