Elif Bilgin

Elif Bilgin is a sophomore at Johns Hopkins University pursuing a double degree in Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science.  She graduated from Koç High School in 2015. Along with her elementary and high school education, for 7 years she attended to BİLSEM, an institution for the gifted children, graduating in 2014, after successful completion of their Math and Biology programs.

In 2013, she represented Turkey at Google Science Fair with her project,  “Going Bananas! Using banana Peels in the Production of Bioplastic as a Replacement of Traditional Petroleum Based Plastic”. According to Google, thousands of students, aged 14-18 from 120 countries entered this competition and her project won 2 of the 5 grand prizes:

• Scientific American Magazine’s “Science in Action” award for being  innovative, easy to put into action and reproducible in other communities.
• Voter’s Choice award for being voted number 1 by the people all over the world

This success at the age of 16, draw a big attention from media all over the world. She’s been invited to speak at Google Zeitgeist America 2013, at Tedx Vienna, at Tedx İstanbul, at Turkish Exporters Assembly, at European Union Inovation Conference in Brussels, at the Technology Development Foundation Turkey’s Technology Awards Conference, at the Google for Education Conference in Austin, Texas.  She was invited to CERN in Geneva by Turkish scientist Bilge Demirköz.  She was filmed by TRT for a documentary on her project which aired in Asia-Pasific countries.  Also, British publishing company, Harper Collins reserved 3 pages of an English Grammer book to her project, under the title of “Think differently”.

A Second year student at Johns Hopkins University, Elif Bilgin is also a part of a research team at the Dolen Lab of the university, working on exploring the social brain in health and diseases like otizm and schizophrenia.