Together with his postdoc tandem partner Dr Lars White from the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, he has already achieved a string of successes: in this short time, he has been able to obtain a DAAD scholarship for his doctorate and has been admitted to the doctoral programme of the International Max Planck Research School on Neuroscience of Communication. “The Pre-Doc Award served as an ideal springboard for our next applications. It provided the opportunity for us to develop a first exciting research question and project idea together. This paved the way for my application to the Max Planck Institute and facilitated the development of a more comprehensive and detailed research plan required for the the DAAD application,” said Dorukhan Açıl. “For me, the Pre-Doc Award offered the unique opportunity to develop and carry out an exciting research project together with a promising doctoral fellow, in order to generate preliminary data for a DFG proposal that will be submitted shortly. Equally valuable was the fact that we were able to get to know each other better during the application process as well as during the pre-doc project that has now started, which made it much easier for me to decide whether to supervise the dissertation and work together with the candidate in the long term,” said Dr Lars White, who supervises Açıl as a postdoctoral researcher.
Dissertation to investigate social-cognitive transference
In his dissertation, he will be working on a psychological phenomenon that may be familiar to us from those times when we get a sense that we know a person well despite only having met them a few moments ago. Sometimes we immediately take a liking to someone we just met because they remind us of our beloved friend, or we throw a tantrum against our colleague as we believe that they aimed to hurt us like our ex-partner did during a painful break-up. “This process of generalization is called social-cognitive transference,” explains the pre-doctoral fellow. “Despite promising research on this topic, we know little about how developmental and experiential factors, such as age and child adversity, precisely influence the quality and quantity of generalizations one tends to make. My doctoral thesis will focus on responses of typically developing and maltreated youth during an online peer interaction. The aim is to shed light on the developmental, clinical and neurophysiological factors underlying social-cognitive transference processes.”
Pre-Doc Award applications close on 21 June 2020
Pre-Doc Award applications close on 21 June 2020
Dorukhan Açıl highly recommends participating in the Pre-Doc-Award. “As an international student, I know that finding your place for a doctorate can be quite demanding. This program also provides us a good structure to contact potential supervisors, to get to know them and to work with them.” Graduates can now apply for the 2021 cohort until 21 June 2020. Up to 20 funding places will be awarded. The start of the Pre-Doc Award contracts is scheduled for 1 October 2020. Further information and details on applying can be found on the Pre-Doc Award page.