About Deniz Yagmur Urey

Deniz Yagmur Urey was born in Seattle, Washington as a child of immigrants from Izmir, Turkey. Deniz grew up in Istanbul on Koc University’s campus surrounded by academics including her father. Her parents and grandparents taught her to observe and ask questions about the world at a very young age.

At thirteen she earned the top score in the National High School Entrance Exam of Turkey and got admitted into Robert College in Istanbul. Her teachers there played a formative role in shaping her work ethic and creative thinking.

Deniz had her first lab experience at sixteen working in Utkan Demirci and Gozde Durmus’ labs at Stanford University. She spent her high school summers working with them where she discovered her passion for uncovering the mechanisms behind diseases. During the school year, she worked on research projects with her peers. Her team’s project on the early diagnosis of pneumonia using machine learning got first place in Turkey in the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey’s (TUBITAK) National Science Competition.

Besides her scientific pursuits, Deniz was also the cofounder of a nonprofit that organized educational support programs and fundraising events for refugee children in Istanbul. She received the award for Outstanding Contributions to Community Service from Robert College.

Deniz moved back to the United States for her undergraduate education at Stanford University. As a biomedical computation major, she got introduced to fascinating computational approaches to uncover the biology behind human diseases. She conducted bioinformatics research in Tony Wyss-Coray’s lab on biomarkers predicting cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s Disease, resulting in publications in Nature and Nature Medicine, and the TIME Fellowship for research in aging biology.

As a theater and performance studies minor at Stanford, mentored by Michael Rau, Deniz explored the minds and behavior of different characters she played on stage. Connecting her artistic side with her scientific background, she got interested in studying the neurobiology of the mind.

Currently as a neuroscience PhD student at Columbia University in Kiyohito Iigaya’s lab, she’s studying the neural computations behind decision making in the brain. Her goal is to examine how alterations in decision-making processes may give rise to psychiatric symptoms. By understanding mental illness as a biological condition, she believes that we can help eliminate the social stigma around mental health and move toward personalized interventions.