Merve Ileri Tayar is in her fifth year in the Brain, Behavior, and Cognition area of our graduate program in PBS. She will be graduating with a PhD in May and beginning a post-doc at Duke University in Tobias Egner’s lab this summer.  Merve is an international student who was born and raised in Çankırı, Türkiye. She knew she wanted to study psychology as early as middle school. She completed her undergraduate studies in psychology at TOBB University of Economics and Technology on a full scholarship. As a first-generation college student coming from a small city, this opportunity meant a lot to Merve and she made the most of it, ultimately working as a research assistant in a lab studying cognitive control and completing an honors thesis, before pursuing a master’s degree at Middle East Technical University. With the goal of pursuing a PhD in the United States, she applied for and received a Fulbright Scholarship but declined it in favor of the McDonnell International Scholars Academy fellowship at WashU. 

Recently awarded the Dean's Award for Graduate Research Excellence in Arts & Sciences, Merve has epitomized excellence in research during her time at WashU. She has amassed a strikingly impressive record with 8 publications in top peer-reviewed journals (reporting 26 experiments in total), several invited research talks, and a continuous record of poster presentations at major conferences. Merve has become a leader in the field of cognitive control, with innovative and systematic findings that challenge extant views of how people focus their attention when faced with distraction. Her research has demonstrated the learning-dependent, flexible, and seemingly automatic nature of select control mechanisms, with a recent focus in her dissertation on how reward shapes the learning and persistence of control. Furthermore, her research on cognitive control across the adult lifespan has offered novel insights into the divergent paths of two distinct mechanisms, demonstrating both patterns of decline and maintenance with age, with unique insights into how select mechanisms are changing in middle age, an oft neglected part of the lifespan. Merve has demonstrated exceptional leadership, first authoring six of her publications, and contributing centrally to every stage of the research process. She has already garnered a national and international reputation, as demonstrated by ongoing research collaborations and invited talks.

Merve’s five most recent first-authored publications were published in three of the top journals for experimental psychology (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General; Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance; Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition) with three of these accepted within the same 12-month period—an extraordinary achievement for any academic, let alone a graduate student! Additionally, Merve has won two highly selective grants from the Psychonomic Society to present her research at its annual conference (the top conference for cognitive psychologists): the Psychonomic Society Graduate Travel Award and the Psychonomic Society J. Frank Yates Student Conference Award.

Merve is a broadly respected colleague and sought-out collaborator. In addition to the research she conducted with me and members of the Cognitive Control and Aging Lab, Merve collaborated with two other faculty members in PBS: with Todd Braver on the aging research described above, and with Wouter Kool on innovative projects investigating the costs of switching internal attentional states and the role of reward in sharpening cognitive control, with the latter project serving as an opportunity to learn computational modeling under Wouter’s guidance. Merve also shined in her leadership and service to our department (as an AI for a graduate-level statistics course and a member of a Faculty Search Committee) and the broader university community (as a MISA fellow) and has been selected as the student speaker for the upcoming A&S Hooding and Recognition ceremony during graduation.

Merve’s successes reflect her many strengths: she is genuinely curious about the questions that drive her research, she doesn’t lose sight of the big picture while also being detail-oriented in all the ways that matter, she juggles a remarkable number of projects, and she makes progress extremely efficiently because of her firm grasp of the literature, technical and statistical competence, and her ability to write clearly and compellingly. On top of these intellectual strengths, she is humble, well-rounded, and caring, a warm presence that has brought joy to our department during the last 5 years.