Two desks
Colleagues sometimes ask why a surgeon who operates every week still spends time in a laboratory. The honest answer is that I have always kept two desks. At one, I examine patients and operate. At the other, I read, analyze data, and try to answer the questions the first desk keeps sending me. Neither desk makes sense without the other.
Ankara: learning the craft
I studied medicine at Gazi University and trained in ophthalmology at Başkent University, both in Ankara. Residency teaches you how to recognize disease and how to operate safely, but it also plants questions that the textbooks of the time could not answer. Why does one patient's dry eye heal and another's burn on for years? Why does a young cornea slowly warp into ? Those questions followed me out of the clinic.
Miami: learning to ask
In 2014, with a TÜBİTAK postdoctoral scholarship, I went to the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami to work in cornea and research. A year at a place like that changes how you think. I learned that a good research question is a discipline of its own: narrow enough to test, important enough to matter. I also learned that scientific English, scientific skepticism, and scientific friendship are skills you practice daily, like surgery.
Paris: learning to stay
A few years later I moved again, this time to Paris, for a cornea fellowship at Cochin Hospital. Paris was supposed to be a chapter; it became a second education. Alongside the fellowship I pursued doctoral work, and in the end completed two PhDs, one in neuroscience at the University of Paris Cité and one in medical biochemistry at Gazi University, between 2019 and 2023. Living between two countries, two languages, and two academic systems was demanding. It also taught me that the same ocular surface can be described in the vocabulary of a clinic, a molecular pathway, or a signaling receptor, and that the richest answers come when you refuse to choose just one vocabulary.
What mentorship really is
None of these moves happened alone. At every stage there were senior people who opened a door, trusted me with a project, or simply took my questions seriously. I have come to think of mentorship less as advice and more as permission: permission to be curious, to change cities, to start a difficult degree while working full time. Today, as a professor in Ankara, I try to pass that permission on to my own students and residents. Watching a young doctor ask their first real research question is one of the quiet pleasures of academic life.
Why the bench still matters
So why does a surgeon still do bench research? Because the clinic generates questions that only the laboratory can answer, and the laboratory returns answers that change the operating room. My work on oxidative stress and inflammation in began with patients whose eyes we could not fully explain; years later, that line of work helped point toward a molecular pathway and a possible drug target. The distance from a burning, red eye to a receptor pathway is long, but it is walkable, and someone has to walk it.
I still keep two desks. Increasingly, they feel like the same desk, seen from two sides.