Pınar ÖZ, Ph.D

Pınar ÖZ is Assistant Professor at Uskudar University, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics since 2015. During 2012 – 2014, she was a post-doctoral researcher in Boğaziçi University, Institute of Biomedical Engineering (İstanbul, Turkey). From 2011 to 2012, she worked a post-doctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-organization (Göttingen, Germany). She received her PhD in Neuroscience from “International Max Planck Research School on Neurosciences” (Göttingen, Germany) in 2011 with Magna Cum Laude. Her PhD specialty was computational neuroscience and the thesis was entitled as “Theoretical analysis of membrane properties underlying action potential phase-locking in fluctuation driven neurons”. During her PhD, she worked as a research assistant in Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-organization from 2009 to 2011. She was awarded with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Scholarship from Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture (Germany) for 2008-2009. During 2006 -2007, she studied for MSc degree in the same program and was directly admitted to the PhD program after passing the MSc exams. She received her BSc in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Boğaziçi University (İstanbul, Turkey) in 2006.

Her research interests center on understanding the functional neurodevelopment of the mammalian brain, with an emphasis on the networks involved in neurodevelopmental disorders, such as schizophrenia. Her experimental research methods include designing in vivo and in vitro models of neurodevelopmental disorders and exploring therapeutic approaches on these models, stereotaxical surgery on rodents, electrophysiology, behavioral tasks and molecular assays. She is also currently coordinating research on hippocampal network models with the implementation of adult neurogenesis and prepulse inhibition networks in rodent brain with the use of C++, Phyton, Matlab and NEURON. She also extends her research interests to bioinformatics, specifically to the transcriptomics of neurodevelopmental disorders via Matlab. Her keen interest in neurophilosophy also drifted her into the studies of Mind Theory and development of self.

Since 2015, she is a board member in Neuropsychopharmacology Application and Research Center (NPARC). In addition to scientific research, she published several popular science articles and she is an amateur photographer.