Department of Computer Engineering PhD candidate Mohammed Alser has been singled out among Palestinian doctoral researchers working in Turkey to receive the 2017 Yasser Arafat Award for academic excellence. The award was presented at a ceremony held in İstanbul on November 11, which was organized by the Anemone Cultural Foundation (ACUF) and hosted under the patronage of Palestine’s president, Mahmoud Abbas.
The Yasser Arafat Award recognizes students who demonstrate a high level of excellence in academic and research activities, as well as excellence outside their course work and commitment to their area of study. Given this year for the fourth time since 2014, it is presented annually to four Palestinian students (one each at the doctoral, master’s, bachelor of medicine and undergraduate levels) in Turkey. The jury for the award includes two Turkish professors and two Palestinian professors.
Mohammed is working with Asst. Prof. Can Alkan and Prof. Onur Mutlu on accelerating the DNA read mapping process through the development of novel algorithms and hardware architectures. During his doctoral studies, he has also received a TÜBİTAK-2215 fellowship and a HiPEAC collaboration grant from the European Network on High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation for his current research endeavors. He was previously a visiting researcher at ZarLab at UCLA in the US and is currently a visiting researcher at CFAED at TU Dresden in Germany.