Defne Ceyhan

Defne Ceyhan is a first-year PhD student in the Computational and Systems Biology program at MIT, where she is a member of the Hansen Lab and is co-mentored by Dr. Zuzana Tothova. She graduated from The Ohio State University in 2025 with a B.S. in Data Analytics. Throughout college, she interned in Dr. Peter White’s computational genomics group at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, working on projects ranging from ancestry inference and variant pathogenicity prediction to an analysis of DNA methylation in central nervous system tumors. In the summers during college, she also participated in research programs at Northwestern, MIT, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she studied low complexity regions in the Salmonella proteome, epigenetic modifications underlying risk to opioid use disorder, and the subcellular localization of RNA-binding proteins. She is excited to collaborate with the Tothova Lab and combine her interests in cancer biology and 3D genome organization.