Speakers

Dr. Handan Melike Dönertaş completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge and EMBL-EBI on computational approaches to aging and age-related diseases. As an EMBO and MSCA postdoctoral fellowship awardee, she moved on to the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and Leibniz-FLI to study microbiome-host interactions in aging, then started her independent group at Leibniz-FLI, the AI in Microbiome and Aging Research Group, funded by the Carl Zeiss Foundation. Her group integrates machine learning, network biology, and information theory across multi-omic and population-scale data to understand and intervene in age-related functional decline, from the microbiome's causal role in aging to cellular senescence. She recently relocated to METU and started her group there. She continues to lead the group at Leibniz-FLI as an Associate Group Leader. She is a Principal Investigator in CRC 1310 "Predictability in Evolution" and an Associate PI in the "Balance of the Microverse" Cluster of Excellence.