About Me
About Me
I was born and raised in Hayrabolu, a small farming town in Tekirdağ, in Turkey’s Thrace region. My father runs a kırtasiye, a neighborhood stationery and bookshop, and I grew up among its shelves, surrounded by books, notebooks, and the smell of fresh paper. Long before I lived anywhere near a major university, those shelves were my first library. They gave a curious kid from a small town something that turned out to be priceless: the habit of reading widely, asking questions, and believing that ideas were worth chasing.
At fourteen, I left home to attend Istanbul Atatürk Science High School, one of Turkey’s selective science high schools. Moving to Istanbul on my own as a teenager broadened my horizons in every direction, academically, socially, and in my sense of what might be possible for someone with my background.
That path led me to Koç University, which offered me a rare opportunity in Turkish higher education: to pursue a Doctor of Medicine and a B.A. in International Relations as a double major, at the same time. It meant I never had to choose between my two great passions, medicine and policymaking, and could follow them together. I am the first in my family to graduate from college and medical school, and the first to pursue advanced academic study. I carry that with me every day, and it is why I care so much about helping other first-generation students reach everything they are capable of.
With the support of the Jean Monnet Scholarship and the Holland Scholarship, I went on to study health economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Today I am a physician and decision scientist, and a PhD candidate in Health Policy and Management (Economics Track) at Yale University, where I am advised by A. David Paltiel. My doctoral dissertation brings prediction and decision science to menopause and hormone therapy, developing models that forecast when women reach menopause and using them to work out which patients benefit most from treatment and whether guidelines should be tailored by group rather than applied one size fits all. My research uses decision modeling, microsimulation, and health-economic methods to turn evidence into policy, from tobacco regulation and maternal and infant health to the responsible use of AI in medicine and the design of fair, evidence-based health systems. Some of that work has appeared in Hypertension, Health Affairs Scholar, and the European Journal of Internal Medicine.
Beyond my own field, I care about the bigger picture that health sits within: sustainable development, the fight against poverty, energy security, global governance, and innovation in medicine. I am drawn to architecture and to the craft of explaining complex ideas clearly. At heart, I am still the kid from Hayrabolu, raised among his father’s bookshelves, who believes that good evidence, used well, can make health systems better, fairer, and more efficient, especially for the people and places that are too often overlooked.
Areas of Expertise
- Health Economics
- Decision Modeling
- Data Analysis
- Comparative Health Systems
- Women's Health
- AI in Medicine