For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about how ancient DNA unlocks secrets of early life forms and evolutionary processes.
How did you first get interested in molecular sciences and origins?
I immigrated to the United States from Istanbul, Turkey when I was 20 years old to start a biochemistry PhD at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. I was eager and perhaps should have been a bit afraid, but I was young and ignorant. In a way it’s a good thing — you don’t want to overthink these things, and I was just so excited about the scientific scene at Emory. I’d first visited the U.S. a year earlier, on a Howard Hughes Medical Institute summer undergraduate research fellowship. I fell absolutely in love with the pace, the intensity, and the passion of witnessing a bunch of scientists getting together in a room (with no windows, oftentimes!) and voluntarily spending hours learning about a question that is so specific. It was extremely inspirational — I knew that I was hooked for life.