Zeynep Kabakci

PhD Student

Zeynep Kabakci

Office Y11-L-26

Tel +41 44 635 48 80

Zeynep was born in Switzerland in 1992 and has grown up in the small town Baar, Switzerland. There, she attended the elementary school and in 2011 graduated from the high school in Zug. Shortly after, she started her academic career in the Life Science department of the University of Zurich with a part-time job at the Form-it gym in Baar. In 2015, she graduated in Bachelor of Science and spend 2 months to travel southeast Asia. After her journey, she applied to Christian Lehner’s laboratory for a position as technician where she worked 6 months, then changed her position and has been since November 2018 in her PhD.
Zeynep is currently investigating meiosis in Drosophila melanogaster males that employ different mechanisms than the canonical synaptonemal complex formation and meiotic recombination. For correct segregation of bivalent chromosomes during meiosis I, males of Higher Diptera have evolved to use a process of spatially dividing the paired bivalent chromosomes in the nucleus followed by gluing them for proper aligning at the metaphase plate and correct segregation. The regulation and interaction of the proteins known to be part of the chromosome glue are poorly understood. Zeynep focuses on these issues in her PhD using co-immunoprecipitation and mass-spectrometry experiments of Drosophila flies or their cell line S2R+.
In her free time, Zeynep likes to try different physical activities such as snowboarding, jogging, swimming and hiking. Her interest in literature ranges from non-fictional physics to fantasy novels and she likes to spend time for cultural aspects and art. She is a passionate potterer, which comes in handy for her passion in cooking and baking and her new project - increasing her plant collection.