Dr. Altuna Akalin is a bioinformatics scientist and the head of Bioinformatics and Omics Data Science Platform at the Berlin Institute of Medical Systems Biology, Max Delbrück Center in Berlin. He has been developing computational methods for analyzing and integrating large-scale genomics data sets since 2002. His interest is in using machine learning and statistics to uncover patterns related to important biological variables such as disease state and type. He has lived in the USA, Norway, Turkey, Japan, and Switzerland in order to pursue research work and education related to computational genomics.