Didem was an OEB graduate student in the lab from 2009-2014. She was awarded graduate training fellowships from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada(NSERC) and the Fonds de la recherche en sante (FRSQ). She successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis on December 12, 2014 – see photos of the celebratory toasts here. Didem worked on the developmental genetic basis of ovariole number determination in Drosophilid flies, including lab work on Drosophila melanogaster and field work on Hawaiian Drosophilids, for which she was awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (DEB-1209570). After leaving the lab Didem was awarded an FRSQ postdoctoral fellowship, and joined the lab of David Begun at the University of California, Davis. Upon completing her postdoc, Didem pursued her interest in building and managing relationships between scientists and is now a Product Manager at 10X Genomics.