McDonnell Scholar Merve Ileri-Tayar has been selected as the winner of the 2025 Dean’s Award for Graduate Research Excellence! This prestigious award honors outstanding graduate research conducted over the past two years. Each department nominates up to two students for consideration. Nominees first present their research to a faculty panel, which selects a group of semi-finalists and finalists. Finalists then deliver research presentations to the National Council of Arts & Sciences and university leadership. Following these presentations, the council selects the award recipient. This year, Merve Ileri-Tayar was chosen as the winner.
Merve, a Psychological and Brain Sciences PhD candidate in WashU Arts & Sciences, investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying attention and goal-directed behavior, with a particular focus on item-specific attention. She examines how people learn associations between experiences and attention settings, and how these settings transfer to novel situations. She also studies reward-based modulations of attention and attention dynamics in aging.