Ceymi Doenyas is a Psychology PhD graduate from Koç University. She has a summa cum laude undergraduate degree in Psychology from Princeton University, ranking 1st by having the highest GPA in the department of Neuroscience, and also with a degree in Near Eastern Studies.
She has been working with and for individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) for 14 years. In high school, she helped translate the educational curriculum of Princeton Child Development Institute into Turkish so that Tohum, a dissemination school of PCDI, could open its first school for individuals with ASD in Turkey. In college, she volunteered at the Eden Institute for Autism and Autism Speaks.
Ceymi received the prestigious Princeton ReachOut 56-81-06 International Fellowship, which is awarded to only one out of 1200 Princeton University seniors. As a ReachOut fellow, she helped start the iPad system in the education of children with ASD in Turkey.
She published the first research paper about the ability of Turkish children with ASD to learn a skill from an iPad application. She also wrote the first book in the autism literature that explains how to prepare activity schedules for children with autism on iPads and how to teach their independent use. She designed a new intervention called “The Social Living Complex” for children with ASD and their families, which is innovative in offering interventions for parents of children with ASD as well as the children themselves and enabling families with children with ASD to live together with families with typically developing children to extend the limited social skills intervention to week- and yearlong experiences. For her PhD thesis, she explored the effects of gut microbiota and inflammation on neurodevelopment in ASD and error-monitoring abilities of children with ASD in different cognitive domains, which make important contributions to understanding the mechanisms of action of different risk factors on neurodevelopment in ASD and to unraveling a domain-general deficit in error-monitoring in ASD in the presence of conserved task performance.