Dr. Colak is an assistant professor of neuroscience in the Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine, where she studies the role of RNA regulation in neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric diseases. She earned her bachelors degree in biology from Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. She then enrolled in the PhD program at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. During her doctoral thesis, Dr. Colak focused on the extracellular signaling molecules that regulate cellular fate in the adult neural stem cells. Her PhD studies showed that neurogenesis can be initiated upon inhibition of the apparent default pathway in the adult-brain progenitors that is oligodendrogenesis. During her postdoctoral studies in Dr. Samie Jaffrey’s laboratory at Weill Cornell, she explored the physiological role of local RNA translation and the mechanisms that regulate it. During her postdoc, she also became interested in the mechanism of FMR1 gene silencing in Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), which is a trinucleotide repeat expansion disease and the most common monogenic cause of autism. Using FXS human embryonic stem cells, she discovered that the expanded repeats of the FMR1 mRNA interacts with the genomic DNA that then triggers FMR1 promoter repression. Her studies showed for the first time that a coding RNA could bind DNA to induce epigenetic silencing.
