Burcu Tepekule

Burcu Tepekule

Assistant Professor (starting August 2026)
University of Basel, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering

Email Twitter LinkedIn GitHub Scholar Blog CV

I am an electrical engineer who is fascinated by evolutionary biology, and ended up becoming a computational biologist.

I have worked on multiple questions in the field of infection and immunity, including antibiotic resistance evolution, probiotic design, host-microbiome interactions, and how infection history shapes the immune system.

My current research aims to understand how microbial exposures in infancy impact lifelong immune function. Early life presents a limited time window to ‘educate’ the immune system, with lasting consequences for infectious disease susceptibility, autoimmune conditions, and metabolic health. Understanding how this process is governed by the full spectrum of microbial interactions — from symbiotic commensals to pathogens — opens the door to interventions that could reduce the burden of such conditions.

Despite the strong interest and abundant data, mathematical frameworks addressing this question remain scarce. My aim is to build a research group that approaches this topic from multiple quantitative angles: mechanistic models to formalize biological processes, causal models to move beyond correlation, and statistical approaches to separate the signal from the noise in complex longitudinal data.

If you're interested in joining my group as a PhD student or a postdoc, please get in touch!

Selected Publications

at