Pinar Obakan Yerlikaya Ph.D

Pınar Obakan Yerlikaya completed her high school education in Istanbul Private Saint Joseph French High School and her undergraduate studies at the Department of Biology at Istanbul University. She completed her MSc studies in the field of Molecular, Cellular, and Behavioral Neurosciences at the University of Paul Sabatier, Toulouse III (France), with the joint scholarship of the Turkish Education Foundation-French Embassy as well as Centre régional des œuvres universitaires et scolaires (CROUS) de Toulouse-Occitanie. She completed her doctoral studies in the field of Cancer Molecular Biology at Istanbul University and graduated in 2013. During her Ph.D. studies, she worked as a visiting scientist at Rome La Sapienza University (Italy) in 2011. Following her Ph.D., she worked in Prof. Merali's Lab at Temple University, School of Medicine, Fels Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Biology (USA) in 2013. She was promoted to the Associate Professor position in the molecular cell biology field in 2017. She gives lectures on Molecular Biology Techniques, Neuroscience, RNA Biology, Tissue Engineering, and Animal Cell Culture. Her main research interest is the determination of molecular targets of various drug candidates in different cancer and neurodegenerative disease models (using in vitro cell culture, in vivo, and Caenorhabditis elegans models). Pınar Obakan Yerlikaya published 45 SCI-indexed papers and is co-author of 4 international book chapters and the "Molecular Biology Techniques" book. Her h-index is 15. She holds 2 national and 2 PCT patent applications. She conducted COST Action (Genie BM1408) project, TUBITAK-3001 projects, and had an EMBO networking grant. She also worked as a researcher on three TUBITAK-1001 projects, and two Horizon 2020 projects, which have won the above-threshold award. Abakan-Yerlikaya is also the co-founder of DAP Genomics Biotech Company funded by the TUBITAK-1512 grant.