Dr. Turkarslan is a Research Scientist at Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. He got his PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology at University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in understanding how cells respond to changes in the environment by reprogramming their gene regulatory networks (GRN) and delineating the principles underlying the evolution of these complex regulatory programs. Dr. Turkarslan uses systems approaches to build global scale predictive network models for microbial organisms and simple communities to reverse engineer biological circuits. Currently, he is focused on delineating regulatory network readjustments that drive evolution of syntrophic community between sulfate reducing bacteria and methanogenic archaea. He is also interested in developing tools for exploration and visualization of large datasets in the field of systems biology and metagenomics. Dr. Turkarslan recently led development of the Network Portal Framework for storing, analyzing and visualizing biological networks.