Imperial College London

The University of Edinburgh

Mill Hill County High School

Master's student at Imperial College London (Translational Neuroscience MSc)

I am a PhD student in Human Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL supervised by Professor Hugo Spiers, on the fully-funded Ecological Brain Programme (funded by the the Leverhulme Trust). 

During my PhD, I will integrate science and technology to understand how our brain constructs representations of the world and uses them to remember, navigate and imagine space across the lifespan and the neurobiological mechanisms underlying such processes, using various techniques including brain imaging, neuropsychological testing, eye-tracking and virtuality reality. This is with the aim of developing navigation-based tests to help diagnose those with neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s Disease.

PHD Student

British Neuroscience Association (BNA)

Local Student Group Representative

The Founders of the Future Community is an invite-only community of the most promising future and early-stage founders under 30. The community was launched by Founders Forum at 10 Downing Street in 2016, it is a private network of the world’s leading Digital and Tech entrepreneurs started by Brent Hoberman (lastminute.com) and Jonnie Goodwin (Lepe Partners). Their main mission is to connect and mentor the next generation of diverse and exceptional entrepreneurial talent to build tomorrow’s high impact, sustainable startups.

Founders of the Future

Fellowship

I was awarded a 3-month Bogue Fellowship to study in the lab of Professor Dean Mobbs at California Institute of Technology. During this fellowship, I’ll be developing computational models to understanding how threat and survival are related to human spatial navigation ability.

Caltech

Visiting Research Scholar

I was selected as one of 25 participants for the Methods in Neuroscience at Dartmouth Summer School. The summer school focuses on understanding how minds interact and connect with each other. It will introduce computational techniques to help us understand how we infer the beliefs, goals, intentions, and feelings of other agents, and how this information is communicated to others. Increasingly, it is becoming possible to study these processes in non-human animals, resulting in a productive synergy between researchers working with human and non-human subjects. The summer school covers topics such as communication, mentalizing, synchronization, social networks, and more.

Dartmouth College

Selected participant of the Methods in Neuroscience at Dartmouth Summerschool, 2023 

Over a period of 2 months, I worked as part of a recently established organisation where I researched different markets across the globe with a focus on digital health. I explored the entrepreneurial landscape with the aim of understanding the factors that enable a company to quickly establish itself and trade in a new foreign market.

Trade Aide

Researcher

Pint of Science is a worldwide science festival which brings researchers to your local pub/cafe/space to share their scientific discoveries with you. Being a volunteer with Pint of Science, I am contacting speakers to give talks on the latest and upcoming research within their given field of interest.

Pint of Science UK

Volunteer

I am delighted to have been selected as part of the Olam Ventures Education Team where I will contribute to running the programme and designing the curriculum! 

Olam Ventures is a 12-week intensive talent incubator that supports aspiring build tech-oriented startups by giving them all the resources they need: aspiring mentors, international co-founders and investors. Following the 12 weeks, students will compete in a large pitching competition  where they can win up to $200k to kickstart their venture

150 students have been selected to take part from 20 universities across the UK, the US, France, and Israel, to then build 50 teams who will be provided with top-class mentors. 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/olamv/about/ 
Instagram: @olamventures
Website: http://www.olamv.com

Olam Ventures

Education Team Member 

Working as an honorary research assistant with the Mood Instability Research Team at Imperial College London, I am contributing to the running of studies in addition to working on a systematic review on Reward Processing in Self-Harm which is due to be submitted for publication in late December/early January.

Honorary Research Assistant 

The F Factor is a UK-wide startup competition underpinned with active entrepreneurship education for under 25 year old to harness cutting-edge innovation and shape them into solutions for the World’s most pressing problems. The F Factor provides young aspiring entrepreneurs with tools, skills-training and context to bring their ideas to life and gives the opportunities to collaborate with like-minded peers and to work experience.

At this competition, me and my team Ambulo pitched our idea for an app which uses gait to predict one's risk of Dementia, as well as monitoring their progression of the disease and identifying the subtype of the disease.

Founders of the Future F-Factor Competition Semi-Finalist 

As a volunteer with Drug Science, I am currently assisting with Social Media Communication. This role involves sharing research and news articles related to various areas within Drug Science with the wider community through various communication channels including LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Drug Science

Reverting Motivational Abnormalities Guiding Dysregulated Behaviour in Young People Using Mental Imagery (Re-IMAGINE)

For my Master’s Thesis at Imperial College London I investigated reward processing biases in young people who Self-Harm compared with healthy controls, using online cognitive tasks, questionnaires and interviews via video-call. As part of the project, I set up the cognitive tasks, recruited and tested participants, processed and analysed the data, and interpreted and wrote up findings. I was also trained in how to work with the study clinician to risk assess young people who Self-Harm for high suicidality and determine eligibility to participate in the study, developing my skills in dealing sensitively with study participants. Findings from this study will be used to inform ‘Imaginator’, a mobile app designed to reduce Self-Harm, and this experience gave me insight into how experimental research can be translated to improve therapeutic interventions.

Postgraduate Researcher in Self-Harm (MSc Thesis)

As an elected class representative, it is my duty to pass on any concerns which my peers on my course (Translational Neuroscience MSc) have to my course tutors and senior members of staff at board meetings. I thoroughly enjoy being able to help my peers through any times of doubt or struggle. Taking on this role will allow me to develop my responsibility and time-management skills, in addition to my ability to prioritise concerns in order to ensure that most pressing issues are dealt with efficiently.

Class Representative 

I am part of the ‘Workshops & Speaker Series’ subcommittee with Imperial College London’s MedTech Society.

MedTech Imperial

Subcommittee Member

Royal College of General Practitioners

Virtual Medical Placement

This year, Imperial College Business School selected Code to Care, and Everything in Between, as its annual student-led conference. Code to Care aims to engage, educate and inspire students interested in healthtech, from early-stage development to delivery of patient-centred care, through expert panel discussions, keynote presentations and a week-long hackathon. As part of this event, I formed a team of 5 - Ambulo - where we worked on a pitch for an app which aimed to tackle Dementia. Ambulo is a machine-learning based diagnostic-support tool that can predict the risk of developing dementia by monitoring and analysing changing walking characteristics that is observed in cognitive decline. We ranked 5th place out of a total of 30+ groups and I was awarded the 'Social Butterfly' prize.

Imperial College Business School

Finalist in the codetocare hackathon

At this event, my team Ambulo gave a 60 second pitch for an app which uses gait to predict one's risk of Dementia, as well as monitoring their progression of the disease and identifying the subtype of the disease. This app would be used by clinicians to assess their patients. For more information, see our original pitch  below!

Imperial Enterprise Lab

Winning pitch of the night at 'Pitch 'n' Mix' 

This course provided a 'virtual' work experience for those looking to apply to medical school. I was introduced to the NHS before exploring the roles and skill sets of six different medical specialists. Along the way, I considered some of the challenges and wider issues doctors face. This virtual experience tool was designed to provide some of the most important points one might have learnt in real-world work experience about being a doctor in the NHS. This course also gave me the opportunity to become familiar with reflecting on my experiences in order to make them as valuable to me as possible.

Brighton and Sussex Medical School

Virtual Medical Placement 

Supervised by Professor Matt Nolan, I studied visual Path Integration (PI) in humans using Virtual Reality. Path integration (PI) is the ability to use signals generated by one’s movement to continuously update one’s position with respect to a reference point. A major source of these signals is optic flow - the relative motion between visual information flow on the retina and the observer’s movement. Studies in rodents using optic flow have shown that the estimation of travelled distance worsens as the path length increases. Rodent virtual reality studies manipulating ‘gain’– the relationship between optic flow and movement speed– suggest PI could involve counting travel duration or integrating optic flow signals to internally represent travelled distance. Greater trial-to-trial gain variability might favour the latter. This study investigated whether changing trial-to-trial gain variability during human PI affected travelled distance estimation. Subjects had to a navigate using a joystick to a pre-seen target location along a virtual corridor using solely optic flow. Working on this project gave me experience in working at the interface between Medicine and Technology and gained a deep understanding as to how Technological Paradigms such as VR can assist in the prediction, diagnosis and detection of debilitating Neurological Disorders such as Dementia. Such VR paradigms have the potential to become a screening tool for early signs of Dementia, decades before widely-used ‘gold-standard’ episodic memory tests can.

Dissertation Thesis

I organised my own internship supervised by Dr. Leonhard Schilbach. I contributed to a two-person psychophysiology project involving behavioural experiments for studying interpersonal processes during real-time social interaction. I studied real-time interactions between subjects using optical micro-cameras while using biological motion sensors and infrared eye-trackers to obtain high-resolution empirical data to give multiple readouts of behaviour, including gaze position and facial expression. I completed tasks including recruiting participants, running eye tracking experiments and data analysis with Matlab, Face Reader and Movie Maker programs.

Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry

Summer Internship

Under the supervision of Professor Don Mahad, I used ImageJ to work out G-ratios in order to assess the effect of defects in the cox10 gene (mitochondrial complex 4 gene) in oligodendrocyte cells. I carried out various procedures including PCR, immunostaining, fluorescent microscopy, gel electrophoresis, excel for collating data and carrying out open field studies. As part of this internship, I also went into the clinic to watch patient consultations with the aim of understanding of how my laboratory research translated into clinical practice. I also received the Edinburgh Award for this internship. This award is given to students recognized by the university as having actively worked to maximize their impact on those around them and who have excelled throughout summer work experience.

https://www.annerowlingclinic.org/
https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-don-mahad

Edinburgh BioQuarter

The Edinburgh University Journals Society is a society which aims to provide students with support when writing journal articles with the aim of publishing them in ‘The Edinburgh Scientist’ – a student-run scientific journal. This can be for students who have either completed a work experience project in a lab or for students preparing for their honours project. As the Vice President of this society, I arranged for guest speakers to come in, organised meetings and ensured the society ran smoothly.

https://the-edinburgh-scientist.com/

Edinburgh University Science Journals Society

Vice President

The Global Kitchen Society is comprised of an international group of students who cook together to prepare cuisine from all around the world.

https://globalkitcheneu.wordpress.com/

Edinburgh University Global Kitchen Society

Founding member

As a Programme Representative, I listened to the views of my peers on course lectures, assessments, timetabling, being the first port of call if any student has any issues regarding any courses. I then passed this information onto course organisers and other teaching staff at Student Staff Liaison Committee meetings. Taking on this role allowed me to take responsibility, working in close association with teaching staff to create the best possible learning environment. I was a Programme Representative in my first year for the courses Biological Chemistry 1A, Biomedical Sciences, Molecules, Genes and Cells, Medical Biology and Biological Chemistry 1B, in my second year for the course The Dynamic cell 2, Biomedical Sciences 2, Cells to Organisms 2 course, Microorganisms Infections and Immunity, Genes and Gene Action 2 and in my third year for the Biomedical Sciences 3 and Applied Pharmacology 3 courses. I am also a Programme Representative for the Neuroscience Honours programme (Years 3 and 4).

Emre Yavuz