PI

Pinar Onal, PhD

Pinar graduated from the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the Middle East Technical University (METU), in 2005. After that she moved to Sabanci University in Istanbul to do her Master’s studies in the laboratory of Dr. Batu Erman on the discovery of plant factors affecting mammalian NF-kB signaling. She did her PhD in the laboratory of Nikolaus Rajewsky at Max Delbrueck Center in Berlin and worked on regeneration using planaria Schmidtea mediterranea. She wrote her thesis on the conservation of pluripotency determinants between mammalian and planarian stem cells. Her interest in evolution and development carried her across the ocean to New York University to work on Drosophila embryogenesis together with Prof. Dr. Steve Small. There, she worked on one of the most famous proteins in the Drosophila and developmental biology field, Bicoid. Together with her colleagues and collaborators in the University of Chicago and Harvard, she investigated the evolutionary history of Bicoid’s anterior functions and structure using in vivo and in vitro techniques. She expanded her work in Shelby Blythe’s lab in Northwestern University to include live imaging and epigenetics. She moved to Bilkent University to start her own lab in September 2022. Her lab uses Drosophila embryogenesis as a model to understand mechanisms that contribute to development of a body plan from a single multipotent cell. They employ in vitro and in vivo genetic and genomic assays as well as live and fixed cell imaging technologies to investigate the interactions between transcription factors and DNA that lead to precise spatio-temporal regulation of morphogenesis in Drosophila embryo.