Education

• Ph.D., Computer Engineering, 2017
  • Boğaziçi University, İstanbul, Turkey
  • Advisor: Tunga Güngör
  • Co-advisor: Can Alkan
  • Thesis: “Developing new approaches for multi-platform and multi-individual genomic sequence assembly”.
• M.Sc., Computer Engineering, 2009
  • Boğaziçi University, İstanbul, Turkey
  • Thesis: “Development of a translation memory system for Turkish to English”.
• B.Sc., Computer Engineering, 2006
  • Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

Publications at Alkan Lab

• Discovery and genotyping of novel sequence insertions in many sequenced individuals. Pınar Kavak, Yen-Yi Lin, Ibrahim Numanagić, Hossein Asghari, Tunga Güngör, Can Alkan, Faraz Hach. Bioinformatics, Jul 15; 33 (14): i161-i169, 2017.

• Robustness of massively parallel sequencing platforms. Pınar Kavak, Bayram Yüksel, Soner Aksu, M. Oğuzhan Külekçi, Tunga Güngör, Faraz Hach, S. Cenk Sahinalp, Turkish Human Genome Project, Can Alkan, M. Şamil Sağıroğlu. PLoS ONE, Sep 18;10(9):e0138259, 2015.

• Improving genome assemblies using multi-platform sequence data. Pınar Kavak, Bekir Erguner, Duran Üstek, Bayram Yuksel, M. Şamil Sağıroğlu, Tunga Gungor, Can Alkan. Proc. 12th Computational Intelligence methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (CIBB 2015), September 10-12, 2015, Naples, Italy.

• Activating mutations of STAT5B and STAT3 in lymphomas derived from γδ-T or NK cells. Can Küçük, Bei Jiang, Xiaozhou Hu, Wenyan Zhang, John K. C. Chan, Wenming Xiao, Nathan Lack, Can Alkan, John C. Williams, Kendra N. Avery, Pınar Kavak, Anna Scuto, Emel Sen, Philippe Gaulard, Lou Staudt, Javeed Iqbal, Weiwei Zhang, Adam Cornish, Qiang Gong, Qunpei Yang, Hong Sun, Francesco d’Amore, Sirpa Leppä, Weiping Liu, Kai Fu, Laurence de Leval, Timothy McKeithan and Wing C. Chan. Nature Communications, Jan 14;6:6025, 2015.

• Whole genome sequencing of Turkish genomes reveals functional private alleles and impact of genetic interactions with Europe, Asia and Africa. Can Alkan, Pınar Kavak, Mehmet Somel, Omer Gokcumen, Serkan Uğurlu, Ceren Saygı, Elif Dal, Kuyaş Buğra, Tunga Güngör, S Cenk Sahinalp, Nesrin Özören and Cemalettin Bekpen. BMC Genomics, 15(1):963, doi:10.1186/1471-2164-15-963, 2014.

After Alkan Lab

Pınar is now employed as a Software Engineer at Splunk Vancouver.