PhD Defence Işıl Baysal Erez | Handling Missing Data with Meta-Learning and Large Language Models

We are thrilled to share that Dr. Işıl Baysal Erez successfully defended her PhD on 30 January 2026.

Supervised by Maurice Van Keulen and Mannes Poel, her research tackles one of the most persistent challenges in data science: missing data.

In her thesis, Işıl developed an explainable, meta-learning–based recommender system for efficient and effective imputation and joint imputer–regressor selection, reducing computational cost while improving predictive performance. She also explored the emerging role of large language models in missing data handling and algorithm selection—opening up exciting new directions for future research.

A fantastic achievement—congratulations, Dr. Baysal Erez!