I am a curious molecular biologist. My work focuses on biodiversity monitoring and developing molecular and bioinformatics tools to make DNA sequencing technologies cheaper, faster, and more accurate. I am currently the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Wild Genomics, a bioinformatics scientist at Thermo Fisher Scientific and also a lecturer of translational genomics at the Keck School of Medicine at USC. Previously, I was the bioinformatics lead of Sequential Skin. In my academic life, I was a Principal Investigator for the Monitoring Climate Change In The Sub-Arctic project, funded by the Northern Research Fund. I also was a postdoctoral researcher for the Optimizing Workflows For Freshwater Metabarcoding, Biodiversity Monitoring In The Great Lakes, and Metabarcoding With Nanopore Sequencing projects, funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, US EPA, Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, and University of Guelph grants. I earned my Ph.D. from Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore, where I was advised by Rudolf Meier. My doctoral research has been funded by TEV-SINGA (Singapore International Graduate Award), Singapore's National Water Agency (PUB), Tropical Marine Science Institute (TMSI), and National University of Singapore (NUS). I got my B.Sc. degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Istanbul Technical University. I also completed exchange studies for two semesters at the Technical University of Munich. I am passionate about aquatic research, DNA sequencing technologies, and bioinformatics research. I also had opportunities to do field work in the tropics as well as sub-arctic Canada, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Outside of science, I love dancing, singing, writing, communicating science, and traveling. You can reach my publications, projects, talks, and several other resources from the tabs above.