Seref received a Ph.D. in operations research from the University of Florida and an M.S. and B.S. in industrial engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. His primary research interests involve developing novel methods for text mining and analytics, combinatorial and nonlinear optimization methods in data mining and machine learning with applications in biomedicine, and network optimization theory. He is a faculty member of the Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics at Virginia Tech, and past chair of INFORMS Data Mining Section.