Gökberk Alagöz

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Language and Genetics Department, working on human brain evolution.

I completed my Bachelor’s Degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics (Bilkent University, Turkey), and continued with a Master’s Degree in Evolution, Ecology and Systematics (Ludwig Maximilians University, Germany). As for my Master's thesis, I worked on a collaboration project between the University of Cambridge, and the Babraham Institute, where I investigated a developmental gene duplication in ape and Old World monkey genomes. My PhD work at the Language and Genetics Department (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands) focussed on the evolution of human cortical anatomy, language and musicality using post-GWAS evolutionary analyses. During the last year of my PhD, I worked on the spatial and single-nucleus transcriptomics of the chimpanzee frontal pole.

Currently, I work on the evolution of human and non-human primate brains using comparative spatial transcriptomics in collaboration with the Evolution of Brain Connectivity (EBC) Consortium, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.