I am an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Foreign Language Education at the Middle East Technical University. I am the principle investigator of the METU Language and Cognitive Development Lab.
My research areas include language and cognitive development, development of language processing mechanism from childhood into adulthood, language and cognitive development in underrepresented populations, and childhood bilingualism.
Between 2012 and 2015, I worked as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Lab for Developmental Studies at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Between 2010 and 2013, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Collaborative Research Center at the University of Stuttgart, and at the Department of Psychology at Koç University.
I received my M.Sc. degree from METU Cognitive Science Program in 2004 and my Ph.D. degree from METU English Language Teaching Program in 2010. Between 2007 and 2009, during my PhD I worked as a research assistant at the Department of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading in the UK.