I am Enes Salih Arpa, from Turkey. I am a medical doctor who graduated from Istanbul University Cerrahpasa Faculty of Medicine in July 2021.

By the beginning of my medical school years, I was very passionate to add a research angle on my clinical knowledge. Therefore I decided to do summer internships in order to improve my research skills. In 2017, I did an internship in Prof. Marie-Catherine Vozenin’s lab in the Radiation Oncology Department of CHUV. Following that year, I spent my summer in Prof. Hans Acha-Orbea’s lab in the Biochemistry Department of UNIL. After these two experiences, I did my third and fourth internships in Prof. Johan Auwerx’s lab in the Life Sciences Department of EPFL. 

These internship experiences helped me to be involved in various molecular biology projects and enlarge my scientific perspective. That’s why I decided to do an MD-PhD following my graduation. I wanted to focus on RNA biology, in particular the role of some pathways linked to cancer development, during my PhD that could help me to combine my PhD project with clinics in the future. 

Now, I am very pleased to join Prof. David Gatfield’s lab as an MD-PhD student. I will work on the positive-negative effects of nonsense mediated mRNA decay (NMD) inhibition on cancer formation.