Timothea Toulopoulou

Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

Dr. Toulopoulou earned her Ph.D. from the University of London in 2001 under the supervision of Prof Sir Robin Murray and Prof Robin Morris. She completed most of her postgraduate training and began her early career at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, UK. In 2003, she was awarded a Canon Foundation in Europe Research Fellowship, which she held in Japan. In 2005, she received a two-year Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, which she completed at Harvard Medical School, USA. In 2011, she was awarded a one-year fellowship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, conducted at the Institute of Psychology, Beijing, China. Dr. Toulopoulou served as lead scientist for the Genes and Cognition work package of the European Community’s 6th Framework Programme and was a partner in its 7th Framework Programme. She has held grants or subcontracts from major funding bodies, including the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the Research Grants Council (Hong Kong), the Network of European Funding for Neuroscience Research (Neuron ERA-Net), and the National Institutes of Health (USA). She also serves as a regular reviewer for numerous academic journals. She is currently a Professor of Psychology, with appointments in both the Department of Psychology, where she previously served as Chair, and the Department of Neuroscience. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York.

Dr. Toulopoulou welcomes applications from talented prospective PhD students and postdoctoral researchers.

Mais Tattan

Postdoctoral Researcher

Mais Tattan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Project Coordinator. Her work focuses on resilience to adverse events and social defeat, drawing on an interdisciplinary background in medicine, psychiatry, and public health. She completed her PhD as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands, where her research examined the impact of diagnostic labelling in functional somatic disorders. Her work combines quantitative and qualitative methods, with interests in patient experience, mental health, and research communication. Trained as a medical doctor, she also holds an MSc in Public Health. Alongside her research, she is active in science communication through publications and presentations for healthcare professionals and the public.

Amineh Kakaei

PhD Student

Amineh Kakaei is a PhD student in the Department of Neuroscience, where she researches schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders, as well as resilience. Her broader research interests include clinical neuroscience, resilience, social cognition, and emotion. She holds an MSc in Neuroscience from Bilkent University, an MA in Clinical Psychology from the Iran University of Medical Sciences, and a BA from the University of Tabriz. She has also contributed to research on mentalization and emotional processing at the Behavior Systems and Cognition Laboratory.

Gökçen Hazal Güngör

PhD Student

Gökçen Hazal Güngör is a PhD student in Psychology department. She received her BA in Psychology with high honors from Middle East Technical University. Her research focuses on psychological resilience, particularly its conceptualization in the context of traumatic life events. She is especially interested in the neurobiological underpinnings of resilience, with a focus on resting-state functional connectivity and large-scale brain networks. Her work aims to understand how intrinsic brain connectivity patterns contribute to resilience and protect against the development of psychopathology. In parallel, she investigates cognitive heterogeneity in psychosis, with a focus on identifying cognitive subtypes in schizophrenia. She is interested in how variability in cognitive functioning relates to genetic liability, specifically polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia.

Mehwish Nawaz

PhD Student

Mehwish Nawaz is a PhD student in Neuroscience department working on how disruptions in biological pathways contribute to psychotic-like experiences and schizotypy. By integrating behavioral and genetic data, her work aims to examine pathway-level mechanisms and how disruptions in biological pathways, together with environmental risk factors and polygenic risk scores, contribute to psychotic-like experiences and the risk of schizotypy in twin cohorts of young individuals and healthy adults.

Mert Sarıkaya

PhD Student

Mert Sarıkaya is a PhD student in Neuroscience department with an interdisciplinary background in psychology and science and technology studies. His research focuses on resilience, human-technology interaction, and the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying adaptation to adversity. He is particularly interested in cognitive neuroscience, computational psychiatry, and the use of machine learning methods to study brain, behavior, and mental health, with the goal of better understanding individual differences in resilience and psychological functioning.

Sevginaz Kaya

PhD Student

Sevginaz Kaya is an integrated PhD student in Neuroscience department. She graduated from the Department of Biology at Hacettepe University in 2023. Her research lies at the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computational psychiatry, twin dataset analysis, learning paradigms, cognitive mechanisms, subclinical population risk, and machine learning, with a focus on psychosis risk and schizophrenia-spectrum vulnerability. She is mainly involved in a cannabis-focused mental health project, examining how substance use and environmental risk factors interact with anxiety, stress, depression, and psychosis-related outcomes in young adults. Her broader interests include cognitive flexibility, prediction error, trauma, computational modeling, and machine learning approaches to understanding schizophrenia and psychosis risk.

Zeynep Sema Aydın

PhD Student

Zeynep Sema Aydın is a PhD student in Neuroscience department with an interdisciplinary background in physics, neuroscience, and data analysis. She received her Bachelor of Science in Physics from Bilkent University and her specialised MSc in Digital Neuroscience from the University of Fribourg. Her master’s research focused on the integration and analysis of multimodal neurophysiological data, including EEG, eye-tracking, and behavioral measures, using machine learning approaches. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Neuroscience at Bilkent University. She is interested in integrating computational, biological, and psychological approaches to study cognition and mental health. She has also contributed to a published study in astrophysics, reflecting her early experience in scientific research.

Alperen İner

Master’s Student

Alperen İner is a master’s student in the Neuroscience Program at Bilkent University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Middle East Technical University. His research interests include cognitive neuroscience, psychosis research, neuroimaging, and the neural basis of human behavior and mental health. He is particularly interested in integrating psychological approaches with neuroscientific methods to better understand cognition, perception, and individual differences.

Doğa Aydın

Master’s Student

Doğa Aydın is a master’s student in Neuroscience at Bilkent University. She graduated from the English Biology Program at Ankara University in July 2023 with a GPA of 3.33, following the completion of an English preparatory program. During her undergraduate studies, she gained international experience through a six-week AIESEC global volunteer program in Vienna focused on sustainable agriculture and contributed to sea turtle conservation efforts in Antalya as part of the Ecological Research Association. She was actively involved in student organizations, serving as a social media content creator for the Ankara University Biology Society and participating in the Faculty of Science and Engineering Theatre Society. In her final year, she assisted Dr. Özgün Emre Can by reviewing scientific literature on raccoon dogs and the origins of SARS-CoV-2. She also took part in field studies on bird and mushroom observation with Dr. Arzu Gürsoy Ergen and Prof. Ilgaz Akata. She is currently pursuing an MSc in Neuroscience at Bilkent University, working with Prof. Timothea Toulopoulou on the relationship between cannabis use and psychosis. Her primary research interest lies in neuropsychology.

Selin Tetik

Master’s Student

Selin Tetik is a master’s student in Neuroscience at Bilkent University. She earned her BA in Psychology from Çankaya University, graduating as a High Honor student. She is currently working on a TÜBİTAK-funded research project investigating the relationship between cannabis use and brain function. Within this project, she administers the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, Second Edition (WASI-II), and develops and implements a facial emotion recognition task. Her research interests focus on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying facial emotion recognition and social cognition, with a particular emphasis on how psychotic-like experiences and cannabis use influence emotion recognition processes. She has experience in experimental design using PsychoPy and in implementing facial stimulus paradigms in emotion recognition research.