Can Alkan is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Engineering at Bilkent University since January 2012. He graduated from Bilkent University Dept. of Computer Engineering in 2000, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University in 2005 after a brief visit to Simon Fraser University. During his Ph.D. he worked on the evolution of centromeric DNA, RNA-RNA interaction prediction and RNA folding problems. He then joined the Department of Genome Sciences of the University of Washington as a postdoctoral fellow. Since then his work includes computational prediction of human genomic structural variation, and characterization of segmental duplications and copy-number polymorphisms using high throughput sequencing data, and acceleration of genome analysis through hardware/software co-development.