Erdost Yildiz receives Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship

Erdost Yıldız has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship with a full score of 100%. The award will enable him to design intraocular microrobotics systems for treating retinal diseases.

Yıldız is a new shining neuroscientist in the field of translational ophthalmology. His research centers on neurostimulation, drug delivery, and physical therapy modalities on the retina. He investigates various retinal neurostimulation systems to cure neurodegeneration-related blindness. During his Ph.D., he studied various ocular drug delivery systems and new pharmacological agents. He has been a researcher in the Physical Intelligence Department at the MPI-IS since September 2021. He studies microrobotic-based therapy applications on neural tissues and investigates microrobot-cell interactions in various microrobotic platforms.

“It is fascinating to work on neural applications of microrobotics. Our research will be the foundation of the novel clinical fields for neurological disorders,” says Yıldız. “Working at the Max Planck Institute and the Physical Intelligence Department in this multicultural and international scientific environment is a great opportunity. With our biomedical microrobotic tools, we hope to build new bridges between engineering and the field of medicine.”

The Marie-Skłodowska Curie Fellowship is the European Union’s flagship funding program for postdoctoral research and training. The postdoctoral fellow gains additional skills and abilities by working on a specific research project in a new environment and transferring knowledge into the new institution. Open to all research fields; the fellowship aims to support the scientist’s career and foster excellence in research, helping to advance new cutting-edge scientific fields for the benefit of humanity. Once selected, the fellow conducts a two-year research project together with colleagues at a research institution in Europe. Erdost Yıldız’s host is the MPI-IS, one of the 86 Max Planck Institutes that are part of the Max Planck Society – Germany’s largest research organization conducting basic research in various disciplines.

Erdost Yıldız graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Koç University Research Center for Translational Medicine. He was awarded The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology’s Developing Country Eye Research Fellowship and the European Vision and Eye Research Association’s Young Investigator Award in 2019. His main research areas are molecular pathogenesis of ocular diseases and the development of nanomaterials for neural stimulation.