Seyhan Yazar

Dr Yazar is an early career researcher with a wide range of experience including biostatistics, genetics, epidemiology and more recently bioinformatics. She studied Medical Sciences (Physiology and Pharmacology) at the University of New South Wales and completed a Masters of Orthoptics at the University of Sydney.

Before undertaking her PhD studies, she coordinated the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) Study 20-year eye health study. At the same time, she completed two Biostatistics subjects at The University of Western Australia (UWA) under the Continued Education scheme. During her postdoctoral training with Professor David Mackey and A/Professor Alex Hewitt at UWA's Centre for Ophthalmology & Visual Science, she investigated genetic and environmental influences in common complex diseases and associated ocular traits through exploring data from large population-based studies including the Raine Study and Twins Eye Study in Tasmania. She was awarded her PhD from UWA in February 2016.

Dr Yazar was awarded a CJ Martin Early Career Fellowship from NHMRC in 2016 and joined the computational biology laboratory of Prof Colin Semple at the University of Edinburgh Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine. She returned to Perth in September 2018.

Dr Yazar currently supervises one PhD student and four MD students at UWA. During her employment as a research coordinator and PhD studies, she co-supervised with Professor David Mackey 46 medical students who undertook the Research and Discovery Unit at the university's Centre for Ophthalmology and Visual Science. She mentored two Honours students during her first year of PhD and this prompted her collaboration with the Lions Outback Vision service led by the 40 under 40 award recipient Associate Professor Angus Turner.

Dr Yazar has been awarded over AUD$437,750 competitive research funding to date, with research funding received since 2015 as follows:

2017 UWA Research Collaboration Award; Comparative Genomics of the bare-nosed wombat, a mammalian with five-star energy rating to elucidate mechanisms of energy wasting syndrome

2016-2020   NHMRC Early Career Fellowship (CJ Martin); Stem Cell Bioinformatics for Eye Research: Mapping an integrative network model of glaucoma

2016   Orthoptics Australia Research Grant; Prevalence of Myopia in a Population of Older Adults in Western Australia

2015-2016    Perpetual IMPACT Philanthropy Program IPAP2015/0230, Does modification of time outdoors during childhood affect myopia in early adulthood?

Professional involvement

Dr Yazar was appointed as a scientific adviser on the United Nations Environment Programme Environmental Effects Assessment Panel (EEAP) and co-authored the “Health impacts of ozone depletion” chapter in the 2017 report of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Environmental Effects Assessment Panel (EEAP) for the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depletion.

Leadership and service

In her final year of PhD, she was selected and fully funded by the UWA Dean of Graduate School and Postdoctoral Training to represent the University at the 2014 Group Eight and China Nine Universities (Go8-C9) PhD Forum themed “Global challenges of ageing populations in the 21st century”.

Dr Yazar organised the public forum “Seeing Eye to Eye” that gave community members an opportunity to speak to and hear from the Lions Eye Institute clinicians and researchers during the National Science Week 2016 in Australia.

She was a participant of SciTech Science Café 2016 and a judge at the Perth Lions Institute Lions Club Youth of the Year (YOTY) Competition 2016. She has co-founded with Prof Mackey the Lions Eye Institute Journal Club - an open forum where post-graduate students and researchers come together weekly to critically evaluate recent articles in eye research from a wide range of specialties including genetics, epidemiology, immunology, ocular imaging and informatics and rural health.

In addition to her professional memberships, Dr Yazar is a committee member of Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine (IGMM) Postdoctoral Society.

Peer review experience:

Dr Yazar is actively engaged in the peer review process as an ad hoc reviewer for several journals including Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, Ophthalmic Epidemiology, Ophthalmic Genetics, American Journal of Human Genetics and Scientific Reports.

In her 6-year research career, Dr Yazar published 50 peer-reviewed articles with 7 of these as first author and 4 as joint first author. These articles were published in a range of peer-reviewed journals, including the high impact Nature and Nature Genetics. She has attended 34 national and international conferences and given 12 presentations as an invited speaker and 11 as a selected speaker and presented 4 posters. She represents the Raine Study as the genetic data analyst in 2 international consortia; Consortium for Refractive Error and Myopia and International Consortium for Glaucoma Genetics.

With Prof Mackey, she established the Western Eye Protection Study, Kidskin-Young Adult Myopia Study and eye follow-ups of the Busselton Healthy Ageing Study and Raine Study (20-year follow-up). She also helps with the coordination and data analysis of the Ophthalmic Western Australian BioBank established by Professor David Mackey and A/Prof Alex Hewitt. Currently, she is taking part in establishing the Raine Study 28-year follow-up.

In 2017 Dr Yazar received a UWA Faculty of Health & Medical Science 2017 Early Career Research Excellence Award.

Bioinformatics and biostatistics

Epidemiology

Computational genomics

Computer programming

Engineering sequence analysis pipelines

Performing well-validated and reproducible computational eye research

2016-Present: NHMRC Research Fellow, Centre for Ophthalmology and Visual Science, University of Western Australia

2016-2018: NHMRC Research Fellow, MRC Human Genetics Unit, Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine, University of Edinburgh

2010-2016: Research Coordinator/Orthoptist, Genetics and Epidemiology Unit, Lions Eye Institute

2010-2011: Clinical Research Assistant/Orthoptist, Allergan Ganfort Study, Lions Eye Institute