Hello! My name is Defne Ceyhan, and I am a second-year Eminence Fellow majoring in Data Analytics and minoring in Biology. I plan to pursue a Ph.D. in Computational Biology and ultimately conduct research on cancers and rare diseases.
I have been working in Dr. Peter White’s Computational Genomics Group at the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital since 2019. My research projects include an ancestry inference algorithm, a somatic variant classifier, and a comparison of genome alignment tools. Through these projects, I have gained experience in Python, R, dimensionality reduction, and building machine learning models.
This summer, through Northwestern University’s Quantitative Biology NSF REU, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Keara Lane. Through my project, I characterized the composition and prevalence of low complexity regions in the Salmonella Typhimurium proteome.
At Ohio State, I am the Research Director for the Big Data and Analytics Association (BDAA), where I connect students to text analytics roles within political science research teams. I lead a project exploring the relationship between media coverage of lower court decisions and the likelihood a case will be granted review by the Supreme Court. I am also an Outreach Coordinator for Artificial Intelligence Club, and last year I organized our Hack AI event, an annual hackathon at OSU.