Technical Seminar with Mesut Ünal

Abstract: The quantitative rigor of physics training translates with suprising naturalness into computational biology and cancer genomics research. This seminar traces a personal transition from particle physics to genomics research at a major cancer center. Ongoing projects investigate the genomic and chromosomal alterations that drive tumor evolution, including structural variants, copy number variations, extrachromosomal DNA, and aberrant DNA methylation, detected through long-read sequencing, super-resolution microscopy, and spatial transcriptomics. Tackling them requires computational pipelines for sequencing data, machine learning for high-dimensional imaging, and quantitative intuition, all skills that physics prepares you to develop.

Bio: Mesut Unal, a postdoctoral researcher at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, works at the intersection of computational biology and cancer genomics. He received his BS in physics from Middle East Technical U., Turkey and his PhD in physics from UT Austin, where he worked on the ATLAS experiment at CERN. He then transitioned into cancer genomics research, where he now builds computational pipelines for long-read sequencing analysis, applies machine learning to spatial transcriptomics and super-resolution microscopy imaging data, and investigates genomic alterations driving tumor evolution, including structural variants, extrachromosomal DNA, and DNA methylation.