Oguzhan Kulekci, Ph.D.

Biographical Information

Dr. Kulekci received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Sabanci University, Türkiye, following BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering from Boğaziçi University, Türkiye. He conducted postdoctoral research at Texas A&M University under the supervision of Jeffrey Scott Vitter.

Early in his career, he worked for over a decade as a cryptography engineer at the National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology of Türkiye, focusing on the efficient implementation and security analysis of privacy algorithms and protocols in both hardware and software. In 2015, he transitioned to academia as an associate professor at Istanbul Technical University, where he was promoted to full professor of Computer Science in 2019.

Before joining Miami, Dr. Kulekci served as a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science at Indiana University Bloomington from 2022 to 2025. He has actively contributed to international conferences in algorithm engineering and combinatorial text algorithms, serving on various program committees. Additionally, he holds several patents, some of which have been licensed to industry partners. He has also held administrative roles and actively promoted industry-academia collaborations and technology transfer initiatives.

Education

• Ph.D. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Sabanci University, Turkey (2006)

Research Interests

• Theoretical Computer Science
• Algorithms
• Data Compression and Coding
• Security/Privacy
• Bioinformatics

Courses Taught

• Algorithms-I
• Algorithms-II
• Advanced Algorithms
• Systems Programming-I

Recent Publications

1. Parichit Sharma, Marcin Malec, Hasan Kurban, M. Oguzhan Külekci, Mehmet M. Dalkilic: Geometric-k-means: a bound free approach to fast and eco-friendly k-means. Mach. Learn. 115(2): 30 (2026)
2. Muhammed Oguzhan Kulekci, Mano Prakash Parthasarathi, Rahul Shah, Sharma V. Thankachan, Relative Compressed Reverse Suffix Array, 43rd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS), 2026, available at: http://oguzhan.kulekci.info/STACS26_Relative_SA.pdf
3. Madhavan K R, Hasan Kurban, Oguzhan Kulekci, Mehmet M. Dalkilic. Telescope indexing for k-nearest neighbor search algorithms over high dimensional data & large data sets. Nature – Scientific Reports, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-09856-5
4. Mert Onur Cakiroglu, Hasan Kurban, Parichit Sharma, M. Oguzhan Kulekci, Elham Khorasani Buxton, Maryam Raeeszadeh-Sarmazdeh, and Mehmet M. Dalkilic. An extended de Bruijn graph for feature engineering over biological sequential data. Machine Learning: Science and Technology, 5(3):035020, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1088/2632-2153/ad5fde
5. Arghya Kusum Das, M. Oguzhan Kulekci, Sharma Thankachan. Efficient encodings for privacy-preserving data storage and transmission. IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 2024. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10825141
6. M. Oguzhan Kulekci. Randomized data partitioning with efficient search, retrieval and privacy-preservation. COCOON, 2023. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-49190-0_22
7. Negar Golzar, Amir Aghabaioglou, Elif Altunok, and M. Oguzhan Kulekci. A framework for assessing a country’s scientific productivity based on published articles by scientists affiliated with that country. Information Discovery and Delivery, 52(1), 2024. https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-08-2021-0082
8. M. Oguzhan Kulekci. Counting with prediction: Rank and select queries with adjusted anchoring. Data Compression Conference (DCC), 2022. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9810722
9. Arghya Kusum Das, M. Oguzhan Kulekci, and Sharma Thankachan. Memory-efficient FM-index construction for reference genomes. IEEE BIBM, 2022. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9995057
10. Sahar Hooshmand, Paniz Abedin, M. Oguzhan Külekci, and Sharma V. Thankachan. I/O–efficient data structures for non-overlapping indexing. Theoretical Computer Science, 857:1–7, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcs.2020.12.006