Bilge Birsoy

I was born in Turkiye where I went to medical school knowing I wanted to do biomedical research. While in school, I fell in love with Embryology and Developmental Biology after reading Scott Gilbert’s Developmental Biology textbook and came to the US to pursue my PhD in Developmental Biology. I joined Janet Heasman and Chris Wylie’s lab at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to study the role of maternal TGF-beta and Wnt signaling pathways on the formation of germ layer formation using Xenopus as a model organism. For my postdoctoral training, I joined Joel Rothman’s lab at UCSB to work with C.elegans as a genetic model to study the regulators of left-right asymmetry as well as mechanisms of developmental robustness in response to genetic and environmental perturbations. I moved to Colorado with my family and joined Michael Klymkowsky’s lab as a researcher working on the function ciliary proteins during early Xenopus development. Besides my passion for research, I love training and mentoring the next generation of scientists of all ages. As a lecturer at CU Boulder, I taught two upper-division courses MCDB4790 and MCDB4100. I also worked as an instructor at CSU where I taught BZ311 (Developmental Biology). I have 3 kids and a husband who keep me busy. In my spare time, I volunteer to teach Biology and Math to K-8 students and volunteer as the team manager to my kid’s competitive soccer team.