KHAS Public Colloquium #55: Asst. Prof. Yasemin Önder

In the 55th event of KHAS Public Colloquium series, the guest will be Asst. Prof. Yasemin Önder from KHAS Molecular Biology and Genetics Department on Wednesday, November 23 at 4:00 pm with her speech titled “Biological Clocks, Neural Circuits and the Metabolism Symphony”.

You may follow the event at Fener Hall. The event will be in English.

Abstract: The prevalence of metabolic disorders such as obesity is on the rise globally, placing a huge burden on the individual and the healthcare systems around the world as these diseases have many comorbidities like heart disease and hypertension. The control of metabolism is a balancing act, where nutritional and hormonal signals from the peripheral organs as well as information from the environment is processed in the brain which will then coordinate the responses to these signals. In order to adapt to daily cycles resulting from the 24-hour rotation of the Earth, many metabolic processes in our body have a ‘circadian rhythm’. The first part of my talk will be about the peripheral control of the metabolism, where I will present my work on how a circadian protein, Nocturnin, regulates metabolic adaptation in brown adipose tissue. The second part of my talk will focus on the neural circuits controlling metabolic function and hunger and satiety responses.

About the Speaker: Dr. Yasemin Önder received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey in 2006. She then moved to the US and obtained her M.S degree in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2010. She earned her PhD degree in Neuroscience at the UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, TX in 2018. During her PhD work, she studied the role of a circadian protein in mitochondrial function and metabolic adaptation. She then pursued her postdoctoral studies in Dr. Maribel Rios’ laboratory at Tufts University in Boston where she worked on the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying feeding behavior and metabolic regulation in the brain. Dr. Önder’s overarching research interest is to understand how the synaptic circuitry is rewired in response to environmental and metabolic demands as well as in the context of neurological disorders and she is planning to achieve this by studies both at the cellular and circuit level using molecular biology and electrophysiology as well as using unbiased top-down genomic approaches such as single cell sequencing.