Hamdiye Uzuner successfully defends her PhD thesis
We warmly congratulate Hamdiye on successfully defending her doctoral dissertation today!
As a researcher from the first cohort of the WisPerMed Research Training Group, Hamdiye worked in the Algorithms for Reproducible Bioinformatics group at the Institute of Human Genetics, University Hospital Essen, supervised by Johannes Köster. Her dissertation centered on Orthanq, a statistical model and tool she developed for transparent, uncertainty-aware quantification of haplotypes, with applications ranging from HLA typing to virus variant quantification.
During her defense, Hamdiye presented the two papers that grew out of this work:
- Orthanq: transparent and uncertainty-aware haplotype quantification with application in HLA-typing, introducing Orthanq and showing it can match or outperform state-of-the-art HLA typers while also reporting the uncertainty of its predictions.
- Virus variant quantification with Orthanq, extending the approach to uncertainty-aware quantification of virus variants in mixed infections, evaluated on SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1 datasets.
Hamdiye’s work is a great example of what WisPerMed stands for: rigorous, reproducible bioinformatics that doesn’t just give you an answer, but tells you how much to trust it.
Congratulations, Dr. Uzuner!