Mustafa İsmail Özkaraca is a postdoctoral research fellow in Ewing Research Group at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Genetics and Cancer (IGC). His academic journey began at Bilkent University in Türkiye, where he earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in mathematics, thanks to joint funding from Bilkent University and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TUBITAK).

After completing his master’s in 2013, he worked at TUBITAK as an assistant expert, where he was a member of a team responsible for funding allocation for academic mathematics and physics projects. In 2014, he left this role to pursue a PhD in mathematics at the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA. He received the Mathematics Department Fellowship for the first two semesters of his program but later switched to another PhD program at the University of Glasgow in October 2016.

In 2021, İsmail completed his PhD and joined Albert Tenesa’s group, initially based at IGC and later at the Roslin Institute. His work primarily focused on developing theoretical foundation for an efficient large-scale genomic analysis software. In August 2023, he transitioned to the Ewing Research Group as a postdoctoral research fellow, where he’s investigating the impact of structural variants on tumour evolution.