New DDLS Fellow: Cemal Erdem
Get to know our latest SciLifeLab & Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science (DDLS) Fellow, Cemal Erdem (Umeå University), in our latest Q&A-style article. Cemal will be joining the DDLS Precision medicine and diagnostics research area.
Cemal started his academic journey as a Chemical Engineer but later transitioned to Computational and Systems Biology. He received his Ph.D. from the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology (CPCB) in Pittsburgh, PA, USA and worked with Drs. Tim Lezon and D. Lansing Taylor. Later, he was hired as a postdoc with Dr. Marc Birtwistle at Clemson University in Clemson, SC, USA, partly through a prestigious NIH-LINCS Consortium Postdoctoral Fellowship. During his postdoc, Cemal also received a Certificate in Teaching.
How do you think your expertise can contribute to the program?
I am an engineer and a computational biologist with both wet- and dry-lab experience. The former helps me search for practical solutions to the problems we want to solve, and the later training defines my lab’s research vision: understand the biological reasoning behind the problem, devise a programmatic approach, and experimentally validate the hypotheses we generate.
Shortly describe your research in an easy-to-understand way.
Our lab works on integrating multi-omics datasets, machine learning, and large-scale mechanistic (differential equation based) models to build clinically predictive computational models. The goal is also to access and use patient data to create personalized computational models for in silico drug response testing.
How do you think the program and interactions with the other DDLS-Fellows will benefit you?
Well, getting to know and being friends with the top junior investigators (aka future leaders) at the intersection of large-scale data and computational modelling will definitely help in the long run. I got a front seat.
Name one thing that people generally do not know about you.
I am a goalkeeper and was a cross-country runner with a couple of medals.
Where do you see yourself in five years regarding the DDLS aspect?
With an established lab, creating patient-specific computational models.
In one word, describe how you feel about becoming a DDLS-Fellow.
Extatic
