Nurcan Tunçbağ
Nurcan Tunçbağ is a Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Koç University in Istanbul. She creates computer-based models to study how biological systems work and how diseases change them.
Education and training: She studied chemical engineering at Istanbul Technical University. She earned a master's degree in computational science and engineering from Koç University in 2007, and stayed there for her PhD, researching protein interactions and their networks under Özlem Keskin and Attila Gürsoy. In 2010, she was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT with Ernest Fraenkel. In 2014, she joined the Informatics Institute at the Middle East Technical University.
Research and leadership: Tunçbağ is the Principal Investigator of the Network Modeling Lab at Koç University. She works on computational models of complex biological systems and helped develop PRISM (protein interactions by structural matching), a method to predict protein–protein interactions and build cellular pathways and proteome annotations. PRISM can identify “hot spot” regions on proteins that could be targeted by drugs. She has shown how to analyze regulatory and signaling networks using a prize-collecting Steiner tree approach to study disease-related changes, and she can include pharmaceutical and biological agents to help guide therapies.
Software tools: With Fraenkel, she helped create SteinerNet, a web server that integrates omics data to find connections in biological networks. She also contributed to Omics Integrator, software that combines multi-omic data to reconstruct signaling networks.
Applications: Her work aims to understand how the genome changes during disease, including glioblastoma, a very aggressive brain tumor, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease.
Awards: In 2019, she was named a L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Rising Talent.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 08:22 (CET).