She received her bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering (2002) and chemistry (2003) from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She went on to receive her Ph.D. in chemical engineering with a concentration in polymer science and technology in 2009 from MIT, where she was awarded the Materials Research Society's Graduate Student Gold Award. Before joining Tufts in 2012, she was the principle scientist at Clean Membranes, Inc., a start-up company she co-founded to commercialize her fouling-resistant membrane technology that she began developing during her doctoral research. Her research focuses on designing novel membrane materials for water treatment, small molecule separations, removal of multiple types of pollutants, and energy-efficient smart filtration processes.