I am a staff scientist in the Multimodal Language Department at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. I am also an affiliated Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Özyeğin University where I direct the Language Cognition and Development Lab.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at University of Delaware under the supervision of Prof. Anna Papafragou. Then, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics where I worked with Prof. Aslı Özyürek. Before graduate school, I completed my B.A. in Psychology and M.A. in Developmental Psychology at Koç University, advised by Prof. Aylin Küntay.

I study the human language system and its relation to other aspects of cognition. Throughout my work, I adopt a multimodal view of language by drawing on evidence from both auditory (speech) and visual (gesture, sign) modalities. My goal is to establish which aspects of human cognition are universally shared, which aspects might be shaped by cross-linguistic and cross-modal diversity, and how the relation between language and cognition changes throughout development.