Taner Karagöl is a researcher and last-year medical student (intern Doctor) at Istanbul University Medical Faculty, the leading medical school in Turkey. His work aims to bridge the disciplines of structural biology, neuroscience, immunology, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics and other fields of biomedical research to advance our understanding of molecular/evolutionary mechanisms and develop innovative therapeutic approaches. He has collaborated with leading researchers, including Shuguang Zhang at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was a visitor at the Royal Free Hospital London, UCL Medical School for 6 months working with Structural Immunology Group, UCL. Karagöl had worked on water-soluble variants of neurotransmitter transporters and immunomodulatory proteins. By analyzing millions of amino acid substitutions in transmembrane proteins, he maps evolutionary pressures shaping protein function, with major implications for drug resistance and bioengineering. He has experience editing medical databases to study the effects of genetic variants and disease evolution. In addition to identifying natural QTY-code substitutions, a key contribution of his work is the identification of truncated isoforms with evolutionary significance. Karagöl has authored multiple peer-reviewed articles on protein evolution, transmembrane structure prediction, and asymmetric mutational dynamics. He has four pending patents on protein design and truncated isoforms. He was admitted to medical school with top-tier distinction and has received several medical educational scholarships and numerous awards, including Turkish Scientific Research Council International Scientific Meetings Fellowship in 2024. Beyond academic pursuits, he is engaged in scientific advocacy work, focusing primarily on planetary health and public engagement of science. During the COVID- 19 pandemic, he actively participated in translation projects to share crucial information.
