I was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and studied Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. I earned my BSc degree in 2014 and continued my studies at the same university’s Faculty of Biology, receiving my MSc degree in 2015. My MSc thesis focused on the evolutionary relationships of multifocal bladder tumors.

Driven by my interest in evolutionary biology, I pursued a PhD in the Environmental Genomics group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany. My thesis explored domestication-based metaorganism evolution in wheat, and I received my PhD degree in 2020.

I am currently a Research Scientist where I served as the Principal Investigator of the PEARL-AGE cohort study. My research is centered on the vertical transmission of microbiomes and the mechanisms of microbiome assembly. I have developed wet lab methods to enrich the rare microbial biosphere in gut samples and am also performing computational analyses of publicly available human gut metagenomes to identify age-related bacterial guilds.

Education and Training

• Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biology & Genetics – Middle East Technical University
  Master of Science in Biology – Middle East Technical University
• Doctorate in Evolutionary Biology – Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology
• Postdoctoral Fellow – Quadram Institute Bioscience

Responsibilities

• Develop pipelines for microbiome data analysis
• Meta-analysis of publicly available metagenomes
• Design, develop, and apply wetlab protocols for microbiome samples
• Former Principal Investigator of the PEARL-AGE study cohort
• Design, develop, and write protocols for human studies