Hakan Berk Aydin has been a graduate student at the Middle East Technical University (METU) Department of Biology since October 2021. His Master’s studies are conducted jointly at Dr. Ahmet Acar’s Lab from the Biology department and at Dr. Altuğ Özçelikkale’s Lab from the Mechanical Engineering department. His graduate studies focused on biomaterials and tissue engineering with their applications for precision and personalized medicine.

Aydin received his Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Chemistry at Izmir Institute of Technology (IZTECH) in August 2020.

Aydin’s research interests at IZTECH were in-vitro diagnostics, materials science, and surface chemistry. He was the developer/creator of an Android app called “BioRGB,” an algorithm that has focused on the colorimetric detection method as a point-of-care nucleic acid assay that does not require lab settings.
With the collaboration from Nanyang Technological University, the algorithm was reached to visualize the nucleic acid of Hepatitis B viral DNA down to the concentration of nanomolar (nMs).

Aydin has received the 3rd prize in The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) ‘s 2242-Software Contest with the application “BioRGB.” “BioRGB” has significantly impacted national news agencies, with most national TV news and newspapers mentioning it.

While an undergraduate, Aydin has been a member of Prof. Ashutosh Chilkoti’s Lab for six months as a Visiting Research Scholar at Duke University Department of Biomedical Engineering. He primarily focused on working in-vitro diagnostics, surface chemistry, immunoassay fabrication, and polymer brush synthesis during the mentioned period.
The most notable research at that period was the investigation of the antigenicity of PEG when assembled in “bottlebrush” configurations on planar surfaces using ethylene glycol (EG) repeat lengths of the POEGMA side chains and the ultrasensitive rapid diagnostic test (EBOV D4) that detected Sudan ebolavirus and Bundibugyo ebolavirus.