Associate Professor, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University & Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator

Nilay Yapıcı serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University and as the Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator. A graduate of Boğaziçi University’s Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Yapıcı earned her Ph.D. in 2008 at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), Vienna, working with Dr. Barry Dickson. She completed her postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University in New York with Dr. Leslie Vosshall. Yapıcı joined Cornell University as an Assistant Professor in 2016 and was subsequently promoted to Associate Professor. Her research focuses on how animals integrate their metabolic state with sensory cues from the environment in the nervous system and how this integration shapes feeding behavior. Her laboratory employs genetically tractable model organisms such as fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) and mice, alongside advanced neurobiological techniques including high-resolution behavioral analysis, multiphoton functional imaging, and neural circuit mapping. As a postdoctoral researcher, she was awarded the EMBO Long-Term Fellowship and the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Long-Term Fellowship, and as an independent investigator, she has received support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences, and the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR).

Research Focus

Associate . Prof. Yapıcı’s work investigates the biology of hunger and the neural circuits controlling food intake. Her laboratory aims to identify the neurons governing feeding decisions and to understand how their activity changes during food-seeking behavior. These studies seek to uncover mechanisms underlying overeating of specific food types. Her team examines how animals integrate physiological state with external cues to make behavioral decisions and regulate them, and recent projects explore the genetic, cellular, and circuit-level underpinnings of taste perception and hunger.