Dr Zeyneb Kurt

BSc (Yildiz Technical, Turkey), MSc (Yildiz Technical, Turkey), PhD (Yildiz Technical, Turkey)

Information School

Lecturer in Data Science

Zeyneb Kurt
Profile picture of Zeyneb Kurt
z.kurt@sheffield.ac.uk
The Wave

Full contact details

Dr Zeyneb Kurt
Information School
The Wave
2 Whitham Road
Sheffield
S10 2AH
Profile

Between 2015 and 2018, I worked as a post-doctoral researcher at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA, with a focus in bioinformatics, biostatistics, and computational biology fields. During that period, I was awarded with two postdoctoral fellowships: i) American Heart Association for two years and ii) UCLA Iris Cantor/Women’s Health Center Postdoctoral Fellowship for one year.

Later on, I worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Yildiz Technical University between 2018 and 2020 and then joined the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Northumbria University in 2020 August as an assistant professor.

I joined the Information School at University of Sheffield in November 2023.

Research interests

My current research interests include bioinformatics, computational biology, statistics, image processing, and machine learning. More specifically, for example, I employ machine learning and statistical methods to understand impacts of specific interventions (such as Qigong) on wellbeing of participants; to help with self-monitoring and tracking the changes in wellbeing of NHS staff members and understanding these changes using data from an online diary; to predict sub-types in a cancer cohort using functional genomics data and pathological tissue images. I am also interested in the use of explainable AI and deep learning models in my research.

I would be happy to supervise PhD students who are interested in pursuing their career in bioinformatics and health informatics. For example, developing/employing data science and machine learning models to understand the key mechanisms underlying diseases by integrating multi-omics data resources; to assess/monitor the change in wellbeing of the participants of a particular intervention study; employing explainable AI to predict the subtypes of different cancer types from the pathological images; predicting the associations between circular RNA, microRNA, and target genes which drive a particular type of cancer.

Publications

Journal articles

Chapters

Conference proceedings papers

Preprints

Research group

I am the Deputy Head of the Health Informatics Research Group.

I am the second supervisor for PhD students: 
Terence Egbelo Compound bioactivity prediction using KG metapath (First supervisor is: Prof Val Gilet)

I am an external supervisor for PhD students:

  • Zoe Moorton, Thesis Title: Identification of the type of the debris in marine ecosystem using explainable deep learning methods (Start Date: 01/10/2022; main supervisor is: Prof Wai Lok Woo)
  • Olalekan Ogundipe, Thesis Title: Deep Neural Networks integrating functional genomics  and histopathological images data for predicting sub-types in colon cancer (Start Date: 18/01/2021; main supervisor: Prof Wai Lok Woo)
  • Sultan Sevgi Turgut, Thesis Title: Single-Cell Analysis of the Human Pancreas by Using Artificial Intelligence Techniques (Main supervisor: Prof Nizamettin Aydin)

Completed PhD supervisions (as an external supervisor):

  • Sajjad Nematzadeh, Thesis Title: Use of AI for Predicting Secondary Structures of RNAs and Proteins (Completion Date: August 2023; Main supervisor: Prof Nizamettin Aydin) 
Grants

Fundings/Awards I earned as PI or Co-I in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics fields: 

  • An Integrative Wellbeing Framework and Open Online System for NHS and Integrated Care Staff in England and beyond - Funded by NHS England (£40,000 Co-I, 2022)
  • Histological sub-classification of medulloblastoma tumours - Funded by Northumbria University Application Seed Funding (~£13,000 Co-I, 2022).
  • Co-develop an integrative evaluation model and tools with NHS to support wellbeing and trauma informed care - Funded by Northumbria University Participatory Research Evaluation Fund (£6,000 Co-I, 2022).
  • Impact of Qigong intervention on Wellbeing - Funded by UWTSD Confucius Institute (£4,000 PI, 2021)
  • Online Wellbeing Diary - Funded by NHS England (£10,000 Co-I, 2021)
  • Identifying subtypes in pancreatic cancer with a novel single-cell RNA sequencing-based ensemble classification model- Funded by CIS R&I ECR Support Fund (£3,500 PI, 2021)
  • American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship - for two years ($110,000 - awarded in 2017)
  • UCLA Iris Cantor/Women’s Health Center Postdoctoral Fellowship - for one year ($20,000 - awarded in 2017)
Teaching activities

I am coordinating and teaching the module INF6505 Database Design and Data Management in 2023/24 and will be supervising MSc dissertations.

Professional activities and memberships

 I am the Department Deputy Research Ethics Coordinator (PGR, PGT and UG students)

  • Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, since April 2022.
  • American Heart Association Membership (2015-2018)
  • IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Membership

I regularly review manuscripts for the journals:

  • IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
  • BMC Bioinformatics
  • BMC Cancer 
  • BMC Gastroenterology
  • PLOS ONE
  • Journal of Big Data
  • The International Journal of Biological Markers
  • Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine
  • World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology (WFUMB) Ultrasound Open

Other than that, I served as a technical committee member in 2021, 2022 and 2023 for the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Visualization（AIVRV). Also, I have co-led and delivered a 2-day workshop in 2023 April on ‘Story telling with Data’ organised by Innovate UK KTN (Knowledge Transfer Network) and Mondelez for Mondelez-funded PGRs and and give talks on data science project life cycle, data wrangling, principles of exploratory data analysis.

Links

Google Scholar profile