In the early hours of a summer morning in 1999, a massive earthquake struck the city of Adapazarı, Turkey, killing more than 17,000 people and leaving nearly half a million homeless. Among those lost were the father and close friends of Ebru Demir, then a teenager with a growing curiosity about science. “That loss reshaped everything,” she says. “It made me want to understand how connection heals us, grounds us and gives us purpose.” Today, that purpose fuels Demir’s research at SIU School of Medicine, where she studies how the brain forms, values and remembers human relationships — and what
