Assistant Professor Ayca Zeynep İlter Tataroğlu

Dr. Ayca Z. İlter completed her undergraduate education at Istanbul University, Biology Department in 2008. During her education, she also participated as an intern in several research projects at different institutions such as Charité University and Istanbul University Aziz Sancar Experimental Medicine Research Institute. She continued her postgraduate education at Yeditepe University Genetics and Bioengineering Department and graduated in 2011 with High Honors in Biotechnology. Ayca Z. İlter completed her PhD degree in Biotechnology at Yeditepe University in 2016. Her PhD thesis was titled “The effect of tissue transglutaminase induced integrin trafficking on kidney cancer metastasis”. Dr. İlter then became a postdoctoral fellow at Acıbadem University Medical School Microbiology Department. She worked on the epigenetic control of influenza virus-host interactions as a research scientist funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBİTAK) and served as principal investigator on scientific research project supported by Acıbadem University. Later, she was entitled to receive the TÜBİTAK BİDEB 2219 scholarship and worked at the University of Illinois (UIUC) Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department in the USA as visiting research fellow. She worked on a new chromatin-immunoprecipitation technique (CUT&RUN) to identify host-pathogen interactions and histone post-translational modifications by utilizing CRISPR-Cas9 techniques. Dr. Ayca İlter has expertise on many technical fields such as mammalian and bacterial cell culture, virus production, DNA-RNA-protein based molecular biology techniques, protein isolation and purification. Her research focus is on cellular immunotherapy, cancer biology and gene editing.