Başak Bahcivanci

After my B.Sc. in Statistics at the Middle East Technical University (Turkey), I became interested in statistical and machine learning methods to overcome challenges created by the high-dimensional nature of multi-omics data. Therefore, I continued my education with a master's degree at the same university where I studied and compared some modeling techniques such as Gaussian Graphical Models (GGM) by using microarray gene expression and simulated datasets.  

While doing my master’s degree, I was awarded a prestigious sponsorship from the Turkish Ministry of National Education for studying higher education abroad. Using this scholarship, I started my Bioinformatics master's degree at the University of Birmingham, UK. In this master's project, I tried to discover new potential immune markers to eliminate resistance to immunotherapy in hepatocellular carcinoma using machine learning and deconvolution algorithms. 

In October 2022, I started my Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Industrial Cooperative Award in Science and Engineering (ICASE) Ph.D. in the Quince group at the Earlham Institute.

In collaboration with IBM Research, I will be using machine learning methods to develop computational methods for the integrated analysis of metagenomics and metabolomics data from the human microbiome. These methods will be used to understand the interaction between nutrition and the microbiome within the gut using the specific example of dietary treatment of Crohn’s disease.