I was born in 1969, in Ankara, Turkey. I studied Electrical Engineering at Bilkent University for my B.Sc., and got my Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park.  After my Ph.D. I first worked at Bell Labs, Murray Hill as a staff member and then at University of Warwick as a faculty. During my time at Warwick I was also affiliated with the Center for BioInformatics, University of Pennsylvania and frequently visited DIMACS, Bell Labs, and  AT&T Research. Getting bored with being on the move all the time, I moved to Cleveland in 1999 and joined Case Western Reserve University as an Assistant Professor of computer science. There I became a founding member of Center for Computational Genomics and an adjunct faculty at the Department of Genetics,  Case School of Medicine. I am now a Professor and   Canada Research Chair in Computational Genomics  (learn more about my research in French!) at Simon Fraser University where I direct the Lab for Computational Biology. I am also a visiting faculty at Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, a member of the MSFHR-CIHR funded Bioinformatics Training Program and an associate faculty at the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, SFU. I spent the 2007-2008 academic year at the University of Washington and Sabanci and Bilkent Universities in Turkey. My research focuses on biomolecular sequence analysis, RNA structure and interaction prediction, topological properties of biomolecular networks and more recently QSAR analysis.