Assoc. Prof. Yasemin Sohtorik İlkmen received her doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, and continued her clinical work between 2006 and 2011 at the psychiatric emergency department of University Behavioral Healthcare in the same state. There, she gained extensive expertise in emergency psychiatric services by conducting mental health screenings for both adults and children/adolescents, including assessments of psychosis and suicide risk. She began her academic career in 2014 at the Psychology Department at Yeditepe University and has been continuing her research activities at Psychology Department at Boğaziçi University since 2019. Her research interests include a broad range of topics, including psychoanalytic therapy processes, neuropsychological assessments, and the effects of urbanization on child development. Among her most recent projects is a pilot study of a psychosocial intervention program aimed at improving stress management skills in young women. Another research project, which will soon begin in collaboration with Uppsala University and the Afghan Refugee Solidarity Association, aims to assess the psychological needs and cognitive skills of Afghan refugee mothers and their children.
People
Faculty
Dr. Soley is a Serra Hunter Lecturer at the Faculry of Psychology of the University of Barcelona, Spain. She received her PhD from Harvard University. Upon completing her PhD, Dr. Soley worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Pompeu Fabra University for two years. She worked as faculty at the Department of Psychology of Bogazici University between 2013-2023. She is interested in how infants and children learn to navigate the complexities of their social environment. One line of her work examines how various attentional biases form, and what social and epistemic roles these early biases play in shaping infants’ understanding of the world. In a second line of work, she investigates how children's conceptions of social groups develop and become connected to cultural constructs such as values, experiences, and knowledge.
Graduate Assistants
Esra received her B.A. in Psychology from Istanbul Kultur University in 2023 and is currently pursuing her M.A. in Clinical Psychology. During her undergraduate studies, she worked as a research assistant in the Memory and Emotion Lab at Kadir Has University. As a graduate student, she has worked with the Mind, Language, and Technology Lab at Sabancı University and is currently a research assistant in the Multimodal Language and Cognitive Development Lab at Middle East Technical University. Her research interests include cognitive processes and language development in early childhood.
Halide Sena received her undergraduate degree from Boğaziçi University, Department of Psychology in 2021. During her undergraduate education, she worked as an undergraduate assistant at Koç University-Language and Cognition and Boğaziçi University-Cognitive Processes and Autobiographical Memory Labs. She is currently studying for a Master's degree in Developmental Psychology at Boğaziçi University. Her research interests include social and epistemic trust in children, group perception and social learning.
Undergraduate Assistants
Büşra is currently pursuing her undergraduate degree in the Department of Psychology at Boğaziçi University. She has worked as a research assistant at Bilkent University’s Functional Neuroplasticity Lab, where she contributed to fMRI and EEG studies and gained experience in visual perception, attention, and neurodevelopmental processes. During her internship at the Education and R&D Department of the Tohum Autism Foundation, she took part in projects involving children on the autism spectrum. Her research interests include group perception in early childhood, leadership and social influence, their neural foundations, and how these processes are shaped in the context of migration.
Alumni
University of British Columbia - PhD
