Mine Çiçek, PhD

Dr. Mine S. Cicek is an associate professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She also serves as director of Mayo’s Biorepositories Program, which manages the storage, preparation, and distribution of biological samples for medical research.

Cicek earned a doctorate in genetics from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. She then completed research fellowships in cancer biology at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute, and molecular cancer genetic epidemiology at Mayo Clinic.

Cicek joined Mayo Clinic in 2008 as director of the Biospecimen Accessioning and Processing Core Laboratory. Today, she advises researchers and clinical trial teams across all Mayo sites on study design, sample collection, and processing. She focuses on modernizing biobank automation, expanding sample storage capacity, and guiding investigators on how to best use collected samples.

Cicek is a member of the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories. She leads several major national research repositories hosted at Mayo, including biobanks for the NIH’s RECOVER study on long COVID, and the All of Us Research Program.