Erdal Cosgun

Senior Data and Applied Scientist

About

I received my B.Sc from the Department of Statistics, Faculty of Science at Hacettepe University in 2007. I started my Ph.D. research as a research assistant at the Department of Biostatistics, Faculty of Medicine at Hacettepe University the same year, and completed my Ph.D. thesis titled “New Approach to Unsupervised Based Classification on Microarray Data” in 2013. I worked in the Section on Statistical Genetics, Department of Biostatistics at University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) for 6 months in 2009. After that, I got a 3-months bioinformatics training at the Research and Development Campus of the Pfizer Inc. in Groton, MA, by receiving a full scholarship of the company in 2011. After finished my Ph.D., I worked as an Asst. Prof. at Acıbadem University, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics. (Head of Department,2014-2015)

I received the capital support of the Techno Capital of the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology by becoming the 2nd among 1600 projects in 2012, and established one of the first Bioinformatics start-up company of Turkey. I have currently been providing biostatistics and bioinformatics advisory for several EU, TUBITAK and NIH projects.

I joined Microsoft in 2015 as a Global Black Belt, Technology Solutions Professional on Advanced Analytics. I was responsible for Azure Machine Learning, R Server and Stream Analytics across the MEA region. I have been working at Microsoft Genomics since December 2016 as a Senior Data and Applied Scientist.

I am also an ‘Associate Professor of Biostatistics‘ affiliated with Council of Higher Education in Turkey and Biostatistics editor of Turkish Journal of Biochemistry (SCI).

My research interests are in the areas of R programming, Genomics, Machine Learning and Biostatistics.

Latest Tech Blog: 09/30/2024

Genomics + LLMs: A Case Study on adding variant annotations to LLMs through RAG and Fine-tuning – Microsoft Community Hub (opens in new tab)

Terra on Microsoft Azure blogs & Tutorials:

Events

Tech Blog: Benchmarking the NVIDIA Clara Parabricks for Secondary Genomics Analysis on Microsoft Azure

Overview of NVIDIA’s Clara Parabricks along with a guide on how to benchmark Parabricks v4.0 on Microsoft Azure.

Tech Blog: Data Science for Merged FHIR and PacBio VCF Data on Azure Machine Learning Notebooks

How to use data science for merged FHIR and Long Read Genomics sequencing data?

Tech Blog: Convert Synthetic FHIR and PacBio VCF Data to parquet and Explore with Azure Synapse Analytics

Convert synthetic FHIR and PacBio data to parquet for further tertiary analysis

Tech Blog: Combine and Explore FHIR Server and Genomics data in Azure Synapse Analytics

Learn how to use Azure Synapse Analytics for FHIR Server + Genomics data in parquet format

Tech Blog: Bioconductor on Azure

The Bioconductor project promotes the statistical analysis and comprehension of current and emerging high-throughput biological assays. Bioconductor is a strict proponent to open source and open development of software, and collaborative, literate, and reproducible research. As the scale of genomic data grows exponentially in the genomics era, the use of cloud services is on the upward trend to deal with the size of the data. The advantage of cloud computing services fits the needs of the analysis of the varying size of data depending on the analysis setting. The elasticity and scalability of cloud services is a resource that makes it easy for a small lab or a large company to take advantage of Bioconductor's open-source software, and data resources.

Why R? webinar - Genomics @ Cloud with R

R and R-Bioconductor libraries are the popular tools in the genomics space, enabling researchers, clinicians and pharma to harness the power of -omic data, enabled through the entire portfolio of bioinformatics/biostatistics methods. This session will provide a foundational overview of genomics and introduce cloud environment’s rapidly growing portfolio of products and services for genomics data analysis with R. Talk will provide a glimpse into how cloud technologies are being leveraged by different research partners to further their research and development activities in advancing precision medicine, healthcare and beyond. Attendees will be introduced to rapidly growing opportunities within genomics & healthcare in the loud, understand R and R-Bioconductor’s best practices in genomics and be provided resources to additional information about genomics opportunities,Genomics Data Science approaches and developments in healthcare.

Tech Blog: Scalable Genomics Annotation Analysis with OpenCRAVAT in Microsoft Azure

Latest technical blog about the genomics annotation. 10/13/2021

Microsoft Genomics Notebooks

Jupyter notebooks are a great tool for data scientists who are working on genomics data analysis. In this repo, I demonstrated the use of Azure Notebooks for genomics data analysis via GATK, Picard, Bioconductor and Python libraries.

Bioconductor Developers Forum - 01/21/2021

My colleague Jaspreet (Jass) Bagga and I joined the '#Bioconductor Developers' Forum on January,21 2021. We introduced the work we've been doing in collaboration with the Bioconductor core team to provide access to Bioconductor and other genomics tools in the Azure cloud. If you're interested in scalable platforms for running analysis workflows, interactive notebook environments or accessing large-scale public dataset please visit the link for session record.

Microsoft Genomics Research Seminar and Workshop at Hong Kong

Microsoft Azure empowers the acceleration of genomics research development