S. Furkan Ozturk

Furkan is a Ph.D. student in Physics whose research focuses on the origins of life, a fascinating field that seeks to understand how life arose from non-living matter. He is supervised by Prof. Dimitar D. Sasselov as a member of the Origins of Life Initiative. Currently, his work centers on investigating the origins of biomolecular homochirality, as well as studying the effects of solar UV irradiation on prebiotic chemistry. In his homochirality research, he investigates the role of magnetic surfaces as chiral agents due to a phenomenon known as the chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect. In his recent work, by utilizing magnetic surfaces as templates for the asymmetric crystallization of an RNA precursor, Furkan demonstrated a robust way of achieving homochirality in RNA under prebiotic conditions.