6th International Summer School
on
Biocomplexity from System to Gene


Participants

 

Altug Akay received his bachelor in Political Science and Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2005. He received his masters degree in Dartmouth in 2007. He is interested in how healthcare technologies affect global public health and healthcare in countries in the world, particularly how factors affect user access to services and innovative technologies. He hopes to pursue a degree in International Healthcare Policy and Management.
 

 

Suleyman Bilgin was born in Eregli-Zonguldak, Turkey, in 1978. He graduated from department of Electronics and Communication Engineering Suleyman Demirel University in 2000. He took his M.S. degree from department of Electronics Engineering in Institute of Technology, Gebze, in Kocaeli in 2003.
 
He is an instructor at the department of Industrial Electronics at Mehmet Akif Ersoy University. His interest areas are Biomedical Signal Processing, Fuzzy Systems, Wavelet Analysis, Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence.

   
Volkan Bilgin received his B.S. from Yeditepe University in Medical School and his M.S. degree from Bogazici University in Biomedical Engineering in 2003, and 2007, respectively. He is presently writing his thesis and his topic is "Importance of Hyoid Region in Voice Quality" at the Instıtute of Biomedical Engineering at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. He is a member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (IEEE-EMBS). His interest areas include new surgical procedures for changing the "Voice" with the concordance of  the development of new methods in technology.
   

Ozlem Coskun received her B.S. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Suleyman Demirel University, in 2002, and M.Sc. degree from Science Institute of  Suleyman Demirel University in 2005 and will receive her Ph.D. degree in Physics from Suleyman Demirel University, Turkey. Her research interests are RF Measurement and Instrumentation, Electromedical Design, EMI/EMC Applications, and general Biomedical Engineering. Mrs. Coskun is currently research assistant at Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Suleyman Demirel University, Isparta, Turkey. She is a member of URSI, and BIOELECTROMAGNETICS Societies. She has published nearly 20 technical papers in journals and conference proceedings.

   
Gokhan Ertas received his B.S. from ErciyesUniversityin Electronic Engineering and his M.S. degree from Bogazici University in Biomedical Engineering in 1998, and 2001, respectively. He is presently a research assistant and Ph.D. candidate at the Biomedical Engineering Institute at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. He is a member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (IEEE-EMBS). His interest areas include the development of new methods for computerized detection and diagnosis of breast MR lesions.
   
Emily Hammes earned a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and, by the end of July, a MAS of Biological Engineering. She has done research in Genetics, Neural Science and Bio-polymers at Illinois Institute of Technology, Marquette University, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and North Western University. She has studied abroad in Tampere, Finland and Paris, France. I travel a lot, but only to places where I have friends to stay with. She enjoys travel, roller bladeing by lake Michigan, running half marathons, Opera, research, literature, poetry and writing.
   
Lars Haab received his Degree: Diplom-Biologist, (Dipl. Biol.) from the Saarland University in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institut of Biomedical Technology IBMT, in Germany. He is a member of the Computational Diagnostics and Biocybernetics Unit at the Saarland University Hospital. The theme of his Master-Thesis was: "Safe limits of functional electrical stimulation". He studies supplementary Biomedical Engineering with focus on Neural engineering at the University of applied sciences of the Saarland in Germany. At the moment he is working on the Neural Dynamics of Attention.  
   
Ece Gulcur was born in Summit, N.J. on October 23, 1985. She graduated from Robert College on 2003 and received her B.S. from Istanbul Technical  University in Chemical Engineering with high honors in 2007. Her interest areas include  systems, nanotechnology and biochemistry.
   
Justin Kiggins will be graduating in December 2007 with a BSE in Bioengineering from Arizona State University. During his undergraduate career, he had the opportunity to develop diverse interests in health, music, and service. In the Summer of 2005, he worked on a psychoacoustics project while funded by an NSF REU, in Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham's lab at Boston University. He is currently working on his honors thesis concerning the role of auditory feedback on vocal recovery in the zebra finch in Dr. Eric Vu's lab at Barrow Neurological Institute. He spends his spare time volunteering with COAR, a local non-profit which serves resettled refugees. He hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience.
   
Natalie Leong just graduated from Columbia University with a B.S. in biomedicalengineering.  For the past four years, she has  been involved in orthopedictissue engineering research.  In the fall, she will begin medical school in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program.  In the long term, it is her goal to continue my studies in biomedical engineering and become a physician scientist working in an academic setting.  In my spare time, she likes puzzles, computer games, and movies.
   
Aiping Liu received her B.S. and M. Eng. from Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China) in Chemical Engineering in 1999 and 2001, respectively. Her graduate research project is under the supervision of Dr. Jingyang Zhen in integrated optimal design of tooth-locked quick actuating closure for pressure vessels. In 2004, she received her M. S. from Tennessee Technological University (Cookeville, USA) in Mechanical Engineering. Supervised by Dr. Ying Zhang and Dr. Jane Liu, she participated in the research of numerical modeling the displacement instability (rumpling) due to martensitic phase transformation in platinum aluminide coatings. She was a student member of American Society of Metals (ASM) International and the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. Currently, she is a research assistant and PhD student in the Biomedical Engineering Department, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, USA. Her research interests include developing mathematical and numerical models to characterize blood flow in embryonic chick hearts and to understand regulatory mechanisms of flow-induced hemodynamic forces in cardiac development.
   
Gabrielle Paredes holds degrees in psychology, theatre performance, and French from the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University. Her project examining PTSD history and Fibromyalgia  has been featured in poster and paper presentations at the Arizona Psi Chi Undergraduate Research Convention, the ASU Psychology Colloquium and the Stanford  University Undergraduate Research Conference. She was also an ASU nominee for a Marshall Scholarship in 2006 and plans to pursue a graduate degree in International Public Health.  She is currently in the process of obtaining a certification in biostatistics and epidemiology at Drexel University. In the summer of 2007 she will complete an internship in Accra, Ghana, where she will be teaching HIV/AIDS education and studying perceptions of health risk information in international populations.
   
Ranjani Ramakrishnan is currently a graduate student in the Computer Science department at Oregon Health & Science University.  She has undergraduate degrees in Electrical & Electronics Engineering and Biology from BITS Pilani, India. She also has an M.S in Genetics from UNC, Chapel Hill. Her research interests involve applying probabilistic modeling techniques to analyze biological data.
   
Amber Riblett was born and raised in Arden, Delaware, and recently graduated in May 2007 from Arizona State University with a B.S.E. in Bioengineering. She has been trained in classical Russian ballet since she was three years old, and combined ballet and bioengineering in her honors thesis research developing a system to characterize the force distribution inside of a dancer’s pointe shoe. In addition to attending the International Summer School, Amber is spending her summer taking organic chemistry, studying for the MCAT, studying German, working, and applying to medical school. She will be interning at Bayer in Germany this upcoming year, and hopes to then return to the east coast for medical school the following fall. Following medical school, Amber plans to pursue a career in clinical research.
   
Suvimol Ming Sangkatumvong received the B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand in 2002, and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering with emphasis on medical signal and image processing from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003. Upon graduation, she joined a medical ultrasound manufacturing company, Envisioneering Medical Technologies, St. Louis, Missouri as a design engineer developing firmware for their system as well as implementing image processing algorithm for 3D image reconstruction. Since fall 2005, she has been in the department of biomedical engineering at University ofSouthern California, where she is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree. Her research interest is on physiological system modeling based on autonomic nervous system.
   
Daniel Santillano is a doctoral student of marine biology at the Max Planck Institute, in Bremen, Germany.  With an interest in understanding the underlying processes that determine the evolution and maintenance of biodiversity in nature, Daniel studies patterns of microorganisms in the cold dark sediment of the deep sea, an extreme environment.  Using molecular tools to tease apart the biological and geochemical parameters of such systems, Daniel hopes to learn from colleagues in other scientific disciplines who also seek to understand biocomplexity in novel ways.  Daniel is originally from Sacramento, California, and has degrees in molecular environmental biology and environmental systems, from UC Berkeley and UC Merced, respectively.
   
Sinem Serap received her B.S. degree from Yeditepe University, Turkey in Systems Engineering-Control and Automation Option in 2005 with YOK (The Council of Higher Education of the Republic of Turkey) Scholarship. She is presently graduate student in Biomedical Engineering Institute at Bogazici University.She is currently working on her thesis concerning the data classification using SVM in fNIRs at Bogazici University Medical Imaging Laboratory.She hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in neural engineering and working in academic settings. She is a member of IEEE-EMBS society.Her areas of interests are; mathematical modeling of physiological systems, neuroprosthesis, brain computer interface. She is also certificated SCUBA diver instructor and very active in all types of water sports.
   

Carolyn Sparrey has attended three universities, attained two degrees and is working towards a third. As part of a unique undergraduate co-op program in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada Carolyn has crawled oil pipelines in Northern Alberta, computed thermal profiles of megawatt smelting furnaces and a designed miniature ultrasound for arthroscopic surgery. More recently, she completed a Master’s degree from the University of British Columbia where she was awarded a Michael Smith Trainee Fellowship for her work with Dr Oxland and Dr. Tetzlaff exploring the effects of impact velocity on spinal cord injury.  Carolyn has continued with her interest in applying mechanical theories to the study of spinal cord injury in the doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Dr. Keaveny. Throughout her academic career Carolyn has thrived on finding unique and exciting ways to learn new ideas in new environments with new people.

In addition to her academic pursuits Carolyn is an active advocate for women in engineering, chairing the Graduate Women of Etcheverry at the Unversity of California, Berkeley.  Plugging the Leaky Pipeline: Keeping Women in Engineering is a speaker series Carolyn developed in conjunction with the Center for Underrepresented Students to encourage and support women considering academic careers. 

   
Douglas Swehla became interested in biomedical engineering after reading an article on neuroprosthetics in Scientific American. He is employed by a research group studying neural regeneration, brain/electrode interfaces, and targeted drug delivery. He plans to complete a degree in computer science, and hopes to contribute to the development of a biomedical device or procedure in use on humans within 20 years. He studied Korean while in the Army, fools around on bass guitar, and is fascinated by web technologies and the Web 2.0phenomenon.
   
Nimalan Thavandiran will be soon completing his BA Sc. in Engineering Science with a specialization in Biomedical Engineering at the University ofToronto in Canada.  He began his research career at the Toronto General Hospital of the University Health Network studying dynamic mechanisms during human Ventricular Fibrillation.  He is currently at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering looking at the genetic and electrophysiological characterization of human Embryonic Stem Cell-derived cardiomyocytes.  He helped found and organize the Undergraduate Nanotechnology Conference 2007 held in North America, and has presented his research at various conferences including the Karolinska Institute International Exchange Conference for Developmental Biology.  He plans on pursuing further graduate work in the field of stem cell/genetic engineering.
   

Inayet Burcu Toprak was born in Antalya, Turkey, in 1979. She graduated from Süleyman Demirel University in 2000. She took her M.S. degree from Süleyman Demirel University in 2007, all in electronics and communication engineering.
She is a prelector at the department of biomedical instrument technology at Akdeniz University. Her interest areas are biomedical signal processing, neural networks and artificial intelligence.

   
Carlos Trenado is a native of Mexico, where he received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), afterwards he enthusiastically embarked himself in postgraduate training in aplied math at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM and Texas A&M University, College Station TX, thus earning a master in applied math with emphasis on dynamical systems and mathematical modeling. Currently, he is pursuing doctoral studies in neural modeling and bioengineering at the Computational Diagnostics and Biocybernetics Unit of the Saarland University Hospital, Homburg/Saar Germany, where he has been in charge of a large scale brain modeling project with applications in cognition and tinnitus decompensation diagnosis. He has also participated in material modeling and is currently a member of the Leibniz- Institute for New Materials, Saabruecken Germany.
   

Didem Tunc is a freshman Biomedical Engineering major at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. She was born in Izmir, Turkey on July 20, 1988. She has lived in Turkey until she was 15 and moved to the United States at the beginning of her sophomore year of high school. 
She is the Graduate and Speaker Co-chair of Biomedical Engineering Society, and is involved in International Student Association, Delta Delta Delta Women’s Fraternity, and Society of Women Engineers.  After graduating from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology she would like to continue her education.

   

Didem Yamak receives her Bachelor of Engineering degree in 2007 in Mechatronics from Sabanci University, where she held a merit scholarship. She will join the Harrington Department of Bioengineering at ASU where she will receive the Arizona Science Foundation Fellowship pursue a PhD under Professor Metin Akay's supervision.
   
Ahmet Yardimci was born in Antalya, Turkey, in 1970. He recived the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electronics and computers education from the Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey in 1991 and Sakarya University, Adapazari, Turkey in1997, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electronics engineering from Sakarya University, Adapazari, Turkey in 2001. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Medical System Engineering at the Chiba University, Japan, in 2006.
He is currently a Director, Departments of Industrial Automation and Biomedical Technology in Akdeniz University, Antalya,Turkey.. His research interests include artificial intelligence, biomedical instrumentation, biosignal processing and telemedicine. Dr.Yardimci is a member of IEEE/EMBS.
   

  • Last Modified: May 17, 2007