L. Safak Yilmaz (b. 1976) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Systems Biology at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. He received his undergraduate and master's degrees from Bo臒azi莽i (Bosphorus) University in Istanbul, Turkey, before completing his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison in 2006. His engagement with metabolic networks began during his postdoctoral studies at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Institute associated with UW-Madison, where he learned Flux Balance Analysis from the late Dr. Jennifer Reed. Subsequently, Dr. Yilmaz joined the University of Massachusetts Medical School as an instructor and encountered Dr. Marian Walhout, a C. elegans geneticist whose research was expanding into metabolism at the time. This serendipitous meeting led to a collaborative effort to reconstruct a genome-scale metabolic network model of C. elegans, published in 2016. Over the years, he has continued to refine this model and has focused his research on integrating metabolic networks with gene expression data to elucidate metabolic functionality at tissue and cell-type levels.