About Me

Currently, I am a PhD student. Way back at the beginning I was born in the outskirts of Istanbul, Turkey and moved to Texas when I was 6 years old. Ever since that young age trying to adapt to a large environmental change I was into thinking about thinking.

Fast-forward to high school and I was planning to be an engineer, so I took a bunch of engineering classes. I worked on a project that is currently in the international space station (true story). After some thought, and too much sci-fi, I wanted to get back into thinking about thinking so I decided to apply to a neuroscience bachelors degree.

At UT Austin I struggled with my coursework and adjusting to college life. This all changed when I was able to engage in a great deal of research in the Preston Lab. I did a lot of fMRI scanning, some coding of experiments and analyses, and then stayed on for two years as a post-bacc lab manager. The Preston Lab was a super fun group and got me hooked on neuroscience research.

Now I’m at Wash U in St. Louis and it’s amazing! I’m surrounded by excellent researchers and great people. I am given free reign to come up with wacky ideas (one of which even ended up as a full suite of projects: more coming soon). I also have the best mentors I could have possibly asked for.

I am working on a variety of projects involving: Memory, reinforcement learning (RL), and fMRI. Stay tuned for some fun projects on event segmentation and RL.