Phylogeny-Driven Approaches for Variant Effect Prediction

Nurdan is a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Adam Siepel's lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where her research spans computational evolution and population genomics, with a current focus on developing a polygenic risk prediction approach using ancestral recombination graphs. She is broadly interested in variant interpretation, building on her previous postdoctoral work at Sabancı University in Türkiye, where she developed phylogeny-aware methods for predicting the effects of missense mutations and detecting protein coevolution. Nurdan's background is in mathematics and optimization, and she enjoys working at the interface between statistical methodology and human genetics.