RESEARCH:

Didem’s research addresses head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) by linking routine diagnostic histopathology with DNA/RNA sequencing and curated clinical outcomes spanning FDA-approved systemic therapies and their combinations. She is developing approaches to infer transcriptomic states and recurrent mutations from diagnostic slides using uncertainty-aware multiple-instance learning, learn a joint DNA-RNA representation to delineate biologically grounded subtypes and candidate drivers, and build multi-modal predictors of therapeutic response and resistance. Methodologically, she employs interpretable representation learning and rigorous cross-institutional validation with strong focus on reproducibility and bias control, with the overarching aim of advancing precision treatment strategies for HNSCC.

BIO:

Didem (Çifçi) Veldhuizen is an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellow in the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. She completed her Ph.D. at RWTH Aachen University in 2025, conducting her doctoral research under the supervision of Prof. Jakob N. Kather on computational studies of intratumor heterogeneity in colorectal cancer. Her work combines data science, bioinformatics, and pathology to investigate how variation within tumors can be captured and understood using large-scale biological and histological data. As a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow, she investigates head and neck squamous cell carcinoma with multimodal AI methods to characterize molecular and histological markers of therapeutic response, mentored by Prof. Alexander T. Pearson.