Dr. Melike Dönertaş will give a seminar on “In silico studies to understand and intervene in aging” on November 6 at 4 pm. The abstract of her talk and her short bio is shared below.

Bio:
Melike Dönertaş completed her BSc in Molecular Biology and Genetics in 2014 and her MSc in Biological Sciences in 2016, both at METU. She worked as a research and teaching assistant during her MSc. Then she did her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge as an EMBL fellow. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the EMBL-EBI and Institute of Healthy Ageing at UCL. She has worked on a variety of topics ranging from cheminformatics to evolutionary genomics and ancient DNA studies, but her main research focus has been on aging, disease, and anti-aging interventions.

Abstract:
Aging is the major risk factor for a variety of non-communicable diseases. With the increase in life expectancy, aging poses significant challenges to individuals, societies, and healthcare systems. Aging is a complex phenotype with many interconnected cellular and organismal phenotypes. Thus, understanding aging and finding potential interventions require system-level approaches. In this seminar, Melike Dönertaş will summarise her recent research to understand the link between aging and age-related diseases, and different drug repurposing strategies to find potential anti-aging interventions for humans. She will first describe the common genetics of age-related diseases determined by the analysis of medical and genomic data for almost half a million participants in the UK. She will also present her ongoing research to find drugs that can promote healthy aging in humans using transcriptome, structural data, and electronic health records.