Meltem Ece Kars, MD, Ph.D

Meltem Ece Kars, MD, PhD is a postdoctoral researcher at the Personalized Medicine Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Her research at the Itan Lab focuses on identifying the genetic underpinnings of complex disorders, including inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, cardiovascular disease and congenital heart disease using genetic and phenotype data from individuals with diverse ancestral origins.

She graduated from medical school at Hacettepe University, Turkiye in 2013, completed her residency in ophthalmology at Ankara Ataturk Training and Research Hospital, Turkiye and received her PhD in molecular biology and genetics from Bilkent University, Turkiye. Dr. Kars has experience in both clinical and basic science research, currently focusing on precision medicine. During her PhD studies, she generated the first genetic sequencing resource for the Turkish population with an aim to enhance genomic representation for underrepresented populations in the fields of genomics and medical genetics, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Kars’s latest research, published in Genome Medicine, explores the genetic link between inflammatory bowel disease and Parkinson’s disease, identifying the shared genetic factors associated with these two seemingly unrelated conditions. She continues to investigate the genetic determinants of various multifactorial disorders and generate extensive resources of genotype-phenotype correlations for currently underrepresented populations in genomics research to improve precision medicine.