Assoc. Prof. Ayça Bal Öztürk

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ayça Bal Öztürk completed her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering. As part of the TÜBİTAK-2219 Fellowship, she conducted her postdoctoral research at Harvard University for one year. Upon returning to Turkey, she joined İstinye University (İSÜ) Faculty of Pharmacy as an Assistant Professor in March 2017 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2023. Between 2018 and 2021, she served as the Head of the Analytical Chemistry Department at the Basic Sciences Division of İSÜ Faculty of Pharmacy and as the Vice Director of the Institute of Health Sciences. From 2021 to 2022, she held the position of Deputy Director at the İSÜ Center for Scientific and Technological Research. Currently, she is the Director of the İSÜ Stem Cell and Tissue Engineering Research and Application Center and serves as the Head of the Stem Cell and Tissue Engineering Program. In 2022, she was appointed as a Management Committee (MC) Member for COST Action CA21110: “Building an Open European Network on OsteoArthritis Research” (NetwOArk). Under this initiative, she co-chaired the “Articular Cartilage Engineering Training School (ACETS 2023)”, an international training program hosted by İstinye Universityfrom December 1-3, 2023. In recognition of her outstanding contributions to science, she received the BAGEP Award from the Science Academy's Young Scientists Program in 2023 for her research in Materials Engineering. In 2024, she was honored with the TÜBA-GEBİP Award in Bioengineering. Since 2017, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ayça Bal Öztürk has played a significant role in over 30 research projects, supported by TÜBİTAK, TÜSEB, and university BAP units, in various capacities as a principal investigator, researcher, or consultant. She is currently leading several national and international projects. With over 80 publications in high-impact journals, she has made substantial contributions to global scientific knowledge (h-index: 24, total citations: 1959). Additionally, she has supervised two Ph.D. dissertations and ten master’s theses. She has translated her research findings into commercial products, aligning with Turkey’s vision for developing high-value-added technologies. Her project on bioinks and biomaterials for tissue engineering, recognized as a key area in future healthcare technologies, received funding through the TÜBİTAK 1512 Techno-Entrepreneurship Capital Support (BiGG) Program. With this support, she established AdBioInk Biyosistem Teknoloji A.Ş., a start-up company at TÜBİTAK Marmara Technopark (MARTEK). Through KOSGEB and TEYDEB projects, she contributed to advancing tissue engineering technologies by developing BioPen X, a handheld 3D bioprinter (biopen), which became the first commercial product of its kind worldwide. In recent years, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ayça Bal Öztürk has focused her research on biomaterials and their applications in tissue engineering, tissue adhesives, wound dressings, bioinks, and 3D bioprinting technologies.