Assistant Professor,
Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator
Department of Neurobiology and Behavior
Nilay Yapıcı is an Assistant Professor and a Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator at the Cornell University Department of Neurobiology and Behavior. She earned her B.Sc. in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Boğaziçi University in Turkey and went on to earn a Ph.D. in 2008 from University of Vienna where she worked with Dr. Barry Dickson at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP). Dr. Yapıcı completed her postdoctoral training with Dr. Leslie Vosshall at the Rockefeller University in New York before joining to Cornell University as an Assistant Professor in 2016. Her research focuses on understanding how animals make metabolic decisions by integrating their physiologic states and external sensory stimuli received from the environment. Her lab uses a genetically tractable model organism, the fly (Drosophila melanogaster) and techniques ranging from high resolution quantitative measurements of behavior, multi photon functional imaging, and neural circuit tracing. She has been an awarded an EMBO Long Term Fellowship and a Human Frontiers (HFSP) Long Term Fellowship as a postdoctoral researcher. Since becoming an independent investigator, she has also been selected as a fellow for Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences and as a Junior Investigator for American Federation of Aging Research.
