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I was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. I never went to kindergarden and therefore literally cried for a month when I started elementary school. Then I liked being a student too much, hence I remained one for 22 years. I graduated from Deutsche Schule Istanbul in June 2005 with both German and Turkish high school diplomas. In the Fall of the same year, I started my chemistry studies at Bogazici University of Istanbul. During my undergrad, I worked with Prof. Rana Sanyal on dendrimer synthesis for hydrogels and with Prof. Viktorya Aviyente on quantum mechanical calculations of transition states of Diels-Alder cyclo-additions. I obtained my B.Sc. in chemistry in June 2009 with the highest GPA in my class. Two months later, I joined Prof. Kennie Merz's lab in the Quantum Theory Project at University of Florida where I was awarded my Ph.D. degree in May 2014. I joined Prof. Sharon Hammes-Schiffer's group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a postdoctoral associate in Fall 2014. Upon concluding my postdoctoral research of two years, I moved to Houston to join the Center for Drug Discovery at Baylor College of Medicine as a senior scientist. There I served as the Leader of Molecular Modeling and leveraged modeling to aid hit development. I also oversaw the design of building block sets used in the DNA-encoded library platform. In December 2020, I joined Foghorn Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA as a senior scientist where I support multiple programs with computational modeling including protein degraders.