He holds joint appointments with the Department of Physics and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. In 2004, Yildiz earned his PhD degree in Biophysics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he developed Fluorescence Imaging with One Nanometer Accuracy (FIONA). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at San Francisco from 2005-2008. Yildiz is the recipient of the Grand Prize of the Young Scientist Award given by AAAS and GE Healthcare. Recently, he was awarded Alfred Sloan Fellowship, Burroughs Wellcome Fund and The Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar Award in Aging. Sabancı University