Prof. Durdağı is a professor at Bahçeşehir University, School of Medicine. He is also lecturing courses in Medical School, such as Biophysics, Computer-aided drug design, Bioinformatics, and Machine Learning in Drug Design.
Prof. Durdağı received his PhD degree in Freie Univ. Berlin in 2009 and his PhD studies is supported by EU FP6 Marie Curie Research Fellowship and his PhD thesis was graded with summa cum laude (with highest honor) degree. He also received many prestigious research grants (i.e., Max Planck Inst., Canadian Institute of Health Research-CIHR, Alberta Innovates Health Solutions-AIHS). Prof. Durdağı worked as postdoctoral fellow (2009-2013) and senior researcher (2012-2013) in University of Calgary (Canada) and Max-Planck Institute (Germany), respectively.
Prof. Durdağı published two books and seven book chapters on computer-aided drug design. He has around 180 research articles in top peer-reviewed medicinal chemistry and computational biophysics journals with h-index of 39. He has also more than 20 international patents and patent applications. The total citations of Prof. Durdağı’s research articles are more than 4000.
Research Group of Prof. Durdağı applies computational chemistry methods to biological systems. Inter-disciplinary research of group focuses on protein modeling and dynamics, ligand- and structure-based drug design, investigation of molecular mechanisms of protein/drug, protein/protein, protein/DNA interactions and optimizations protocols for rational drug design. For this aim, together with applications of biophyscial approaches and molecular modeling applications research Lab of Prof. Durdağı also develops programing codes for several biological problems.
The group of Dr Durdağı works on several projects for better understanding the drug-receptor and protein-protein, protein-DNA interactions of different systems using several computational modeling approaches and designing novel therapeutic compounds. Prof Durdağı’s research group carried out many national and international projects so far (TUBITAK, H2020, FP6 and FP7). Prof. Durdağı received many prestigious national and international awards including The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey-TUBITAK’s Incentive Award in Health Sciences (2016); Contribution to Science Awards (2016, 2021); Health Institutes of Turkey -TUSEB’s Aziz Sancar Incentive Award (2017); Science Academy’s Young Scientist Award (2014).
Prof. Dr. Durdağı is also the Founder and CEO of Istanbul MedChem.