Turkish scientist Sırma Örgüç named 2021 Schmidt Science Fellow

Turkish scientist Sırma Örgüç from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been selected as one of the 2021 Schmidt Science Fellows.

Born and raised in Turkey, Örgüç studied electrical and electronics engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU), after which she completed her graduate and post-graduate education at MIT.

The bright scientist told Hürriyet Daily News that even though she completed her Ph.D. in electrical and electronics engineering, the projects she carried out were nearly all related to biomedical and neuroscience applications.

"The focus of all these projects was on how to make them more energy-efficient and how to reduce the size or increase computational efficiency. My Ph.D. projects were to design smart biomedical and neuro systems that are as small as possible, as light as possible, and have a longer battery life as long as possible, while people wear these systems in the future," she said.

One of these projects, Örgüç said, was a design of an electronic system that could read signals from facial muscles and understand these signals and know what moves one's face will make at any moment. Another neuroscience project she had undertaken entailed the control of movements of the subjects by stimulating their brain with light.

"Using light instead of an electronic stimulation provided a great efficiency for our system," she said.

The pandemic also steered her research last year when she was still studying as a student at her university. During the shortage of N95 masks, she collaborated with the department of material engineering and designed a mask as efficient as the N95 masks. As Örgüç's expertise is electronics engineering, she also included electronic sensors in the masks.

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