Cenk Sahinalp's background is in combinatorial pattern matching. His recent research focuses on the application of combinatorial algorithms to problems in computational genomics and systems biology. His group develops basic computational methods for the compression and indexing of large bimolecular sequences, as well as algorithmic approaches for variant detection, heterogeneity modeling, and network-based interpretation, especially for cancer genome, transcriptome and proteome data. Computational tools developed by the Sahinalp group include VariationHunter, CommonLAW, DeFuse, Comrad, nFuse, mr & mrs FAST, SCALCE, DeeZ, OptDis, Hit'nDrive, Cliiq, Orman, Dissect and Cypiripi.