Our faculty members, Ercüment Çiçek and Can Alkan, and our graduate students Zülal Bingöl, Sobhan Shokoueiantabrizi, and Masoud Poorghaffar Aghdam have attended the RECOMB 2025 Conference, organized by Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. RECOMB is the most prestigious conference in computational molecular biology, where theoretical advances in computational biology and their applications in molecular biology and medicine are presented. RECOMB is also preceded by several satellite conferences that are focused on specific domains within bioinformatics. Previously, RECOMB 2023 was hosted in İstanbul, organized by Bilkent and Koç Universities.
The Bilkent team has attended a wide range of talks that cover computational methods designed to solve problems in sequence analysis, computational cancer biology, functional genomics, phylogenetics, genomic data privacy, and population/statistical genetics. Ercüment Çiçek gave a talk on reconstructing genomes in genomic data-sharing beacons. Masoud Poorghaffar Aghdam presented his work on dynamic privacy protection in genomic data sharing beacons. Zülal Bingöl presented her results regarding the in-depth performance benchmarking and computational bottleneck analysis of de Bruijn graph-based read mapping tools. Our graduate Ezgi Ebren (B.Sc., 2016, M.Sc., 2020) co-organized the RECOMB 2025 conference as the Planning Chair. Although he could not attend the conference, Mohammed Alser (Ph.D., 2018) served as the Industry Chair.