I am an assistant professor in Clinical Neurodevelopmental Psychology at Leiden University and principal investigator at the CoDAP lab. My work lies at the intersection between developmental cognitive neuroscience and clinical psychology. A key denominator of my work is employing a multi-method approach - combining behavioral and neuroimaging assessments, as well as advanced statistical methods. I aim at discovering reliable transdiagnostic markers that will aid in understanding the etiology of psychological disorders

Biosketch and CV

I am a PhD candidate for the Developmental and Educational Psychology at Leiden University and enthusiastic member of the CoDAP lab. My PhD project (i.e., the Changing Minds project), funded by an NWO Research Talent grant, aims to identify subgroups of people, characterized by similarities in personality, environmental, physiological and behavioral responses in various social contexts. These subgroups, or ‘symptom-profiles’ should help indicate who is at risk for developing social anxiety disorder in adolescence. I am particularly interested in examining potential differences in a brain mechanism involved during social learning and behavioral responses to uncertain social situations.

I am a Ph.D. candidate for the Developmental and Educational Psychology unit at Leiden University and a member of the CoDAP lab. I received my MSc in developmental psychopathology from Durham University and a BSc in mathematics from Purdue University. My Ph.D. project focuses on investigating the functional brain network changes during reinforcement learning in socially anxious individuals. I am interested in using machine learning methods to examine this learning process and I hope to provide insights into the mechanisms underlying the cognitive biases in social anxiety.

I am a research collaborator in the CoDAP lab and a PhD candidate in the Clinical Psychology unit at Leiden University. I received my M.Sc. (Research) in Developmental Psychology from Leiden University and hold a B.A. in Psychology from Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. In the CoDAP lab, I work on the Changing Minds project, and I am interested in understanding the mechanisms involved in feedback processing and learning in social evaluative contexts. As part of the interdepartmental Social Resilience and Security Program, my PhD project - co-supervised by Prof. Ellen de Bruijn, Dr. Anna van Duijvenvoorde, and Dr. Henk van Steenbergen - will focus on the relationship between resilience, uncertainty, and cognitive flexibility.