Who am I?     

       I graduated from department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in Halic University at the end of June, 2005.
       I am from Buldan which is very pretty and quite beautiful town in Denizli and currently I am living in Istanbul which is the largest and most beautiful city Turkey (for more information: www.istanbul.net).
       My university which can be classify as boutique university has well-qualify molecular biology and genetics department although it is very young (1998). Our department is one of the pioneer genetics departments in Turkey and our professors are ambitious to educate good scientists. They have been training us to be successful and they encourage us to study and improve our skills.
       I went to science high school so I was educated to think as a scientist. I was interested in genetics and evolution was also interesting for me.
I am interested in genetics because it was very new in my country. A lot of people don’t know what genetics is and very few scientists were studying on this science. I am always fascinated with new things so I would like to be genetics scientist to be in priors in my country.
      I also interested in evolution because science is trying to understand life and I think evolution scientists are trying to understand the basic questions of people such as “Who are we?”, “Where do we come from?” etc. I was surprise to learn that some genetic scientists are studying on Evolution. I thought they were different parts of biology.
      When I came to university I discovered that there is an area called
molecular evolution. I decided to study on this area so I wanted applied to some molecular evolution laboratories. Unfortunately there are no molecular evolution laboratories in Turkey.
       After my internship in Prof. Chi-hua Chiu’s laboratory I learned that there is a new area in genetics science which has two disciplines that explore morphological change in organisms over time called as Evolutionary and Developmental Biology. So I tried to find an Evo-Devo laboratory.
      After my study in Dr Jordi Garcia-Fernandez’s laboratory I was really happy that I found an area which is exactly what I am interested in. Development is genetically programmed and cyclical. Evolution is non-programmed and contingent. However scientists found relationship between these two disciplines in 1980s and the Official Union occurred in 1999 when evolutionary developmental biology or “Evo-Devo” was granted its own division in the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB). So it is a new discipline and all information is fresh. It is the most attractive part of this area for me.

For more information about Evo-Devo please click!