Tolga Can

Associate Department Head and Teaching Professor, Computer Science

Tolga Can received his BSc degree in computer engineering from Middle East Technical University, Turkey, in 1998 and his PhD degree in computer science from the University of Santa Barbara in 2004 as a Fulbright scholar. He worked as a tenured professor at the Computer Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University (METU) until he joined the Colorado School of Mines as a Teaching Professor in Computer Science.

His main research interests include bioinformatics, graph theory, and algorithms. He has worked on protein structure analysis and on large-scale biological networks. He has taught various courses such as Bioinformatics, Data Structures and Algorithms, Computational Geometry, Computer Graphics, and Probability and Statistics for Computer Scientists. He is also the recipient of two “Instructor of the Year” awards at METU. Between 2019 and 2022, he served as the Academic Committee Chair for the Informatics Olympiads in Turkey, responsible for selection and training of the Turkish team for the International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI), the most prestigious competitive programming event at the high-school level.

Education

• B.S. Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey 1998
• M.S. Computer Science, University of California at Santa Barbara 2003
• Ph.D. Computer Science, University of California at Santa Barbara 2004

Selected Publications

• Identification of an mRNA isoform switch for HNRNPA1 in breast cancers
• Alternative Polyadenylation Patterns for Novel Gene Discovery and Classification in Cancer
• Alternative Polyadenylation: Another Foe in Cancer
• Large-Scale Signaling Network Reconstruction
• Estrogen-induced upregulation and 3′ -UTR shortening of CDC6
• RRW: repeated random walks on genome-scale protein networks for local cluster discovery