Dr. Okur has been awarded the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) Individual Fellowship grant for two years. This is the 9th such grant awarded to a researcher at Bilkent.
Dr. Okur has proposed to elucidate chemical processes occurring at biological surfaces by probing the adjacent interfacial water molecules using nonlinear optical techniques. While the leading scientific approach to investigating biological surfaces has been incorporating dye molecules to probe their optical response, Dr. Okur has adapted an alternative, non-invasive approach: employing water molecules as a probe to report on the chemical processes at these biosurfaces. The underlying motivation is that biological surfaces, being naturally bathed in aqueous solutions, are always in contact with the adjacent water molecules; such a method can thus be applied to almost all biosurfaces.