Umut completed his BSc and MSc in Molecular Biology and Genetics at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, including an Erasmus+ exchange at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, graduating with honors. In 2022 he joined the International Max Planck Research School for Genome Science at the University of Göttingen, where he is completing his PhD in the Clinical Neuroscience group at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, under the supervision of Pr Hannelore Ehrenreich and Pr Manvendra Singh. In late 2026, he will join the RETROGEN lab at the Institut Necker-Enfants Malades, on the Necker campus in Paris, as a Postdoctoral Fellow.
During his PhD he benchmarked alignment strategies for estimating gene and transposon expression from single-cell RNA sequencing data and developed a pipeline to identify and annotate transposable elements. This work led to a single-nucleus regulatory atlas linking transposable elements to adult hippocampal neurogenesis, and revealed how primate-specific endogenous retroviruses are recruited into the human hypoxic and immune responses. He also developed multiple open-source tools, such as ChiMSource and MosaicProt, for modeling and detecting chimeric protein sequences, and has tutored courses in single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analysis for master’s students at the University of Göttingen.