PhD defense of Onur Özer

29 November 2023

Photo: Ana Teles

Congratulations to Onur Özer for successfully defending his PhD thesis

We are very happy to announce Onur's successful PhD defense on the variability and evolution of HLA immune genes in modern and ancient human population. As he started his PhD while the Lenz lab was still located at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, which is associated with the University of Kiel, he defended his PhD thesis in Kiel. 

In his PhD project, Onur studied the immunologically important human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes in different contexts in order to understand the evolutionary factors that led to their exceptional variability. For this work he used computational and statistical approaches on different human genetic datasets.