Gizem is a doctoral student in the laboratory of Gaurav Bhardwaj in Medicinal Chemistry and interested in de novo peptide design to inhibit the activity of macromolecules. She is currently designing cyclic peptides against protein targets including extracellular ones such as SARS-CoV-2 main protease because cyclic peptides have some advantages over linear peptides which are high stability, high specificity and their ability to bind protein surfaces that cannot generally be drugged. She is primarily interested in computationally achieving the best binders that reach global energy minima by analytical calculations and also to test & approve their binding by experimental analyses. She previously did one of her internships in the Baneyx Lab in Chemical Engineering at the University of Washington and holds an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the TOBB University of Economics and Technology from Ankara, Turkey.