I received my B.A. in Psychology from Istanbul Sehir University, where I wrote my senior thesis on the development of the concept of possibility and its relationship with active participation in young children. During my undergraduate years, I worked as a lab manager in the Developmental & Psychopathology Lab at Istanbul Sehir University under the supervision of Dr. Fatıma Tuba Yaylacı. 

I completed a summer research assistantship at Harvard's Lab for Developmental Studies, working in Prof. Susan Carey's lab.

In 2020, I received the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship and began my Ph.D. program at Boston University. I received my M.A. from Boston University's Psychological and Brain Sciences Program in 2022. I recently completed my PhD in the Developmental Science Program at Boston University, where I worked with Dr. Melissa M. Kibbe on the conceptual and cognitive development of infants and young children. 

I study how infants and young children develop concepts, and how they reason about what could happen.

Possibility and planning. My main line of work asks how young children think about possibility. When more than one outcome could occur but only one will, how do children represent those alternatives, prepare for them, and plan around them? I also ask how they keep track of the identities of each possible outcome, in the present and about the future.

Early concepts of plants. A second line of work asks whether infants treat plants as a distinct kind of thing, different from non-living things. This tests whether a basic biological category is present early in life, before formal instruction.

Together, these projects ask how the building blocks of conceptual thought emerge in early development.