The boy on the balcony who never came outside
A childhood observation in a small Turkish town became the quiet origin of Dr. Dilek Colak's neuroscience career
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Dilek Colak, PhD, Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University, USA.
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NEW YORK, New York, USA, 5 May 2026 — There was a boy on a balcony in Sakarya. Dr. Dilek Colak, who now runs a laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine that peers into human brain organoids the size of a lentil, grew up across the street from him. The boy had a mental illness. He watched the other children play. He did not come down. Decades later, in a Genomic Psychiatry Interview published today, Dr. Colak names that single childhood observation as the quiet seed of everything that followed.
“Though I have forgotten the faces of most of my childhood friends,” she says, “I never forgot the boy who was always apart from us. That early, quiet observation of his isolation stayed with me, ultimately grounding my scientific interest in the brain and drawing me toward a career in neuroscience.”
From Hazelnut Harvests to Human Brain Organoids
Dr. Colak was born in Sakarya, a city on the Black Sea side of northern Turkiye. She grew up until high school in a small town surrounded by farm animals and the smell of hazelnuts at harvest. The curiosity that began there carried her, eventually, to the Max Planck Institute for Neuroscience and the Helmholtz Center Stem Cell Institute in Munich, where she completed doctoral work under Dr. Magdalena Götz on the cellular logic of brain development. In 2009 she crossed the Atlantic for a postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Dr. Samie Jaffrey at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The move felt impulsive. She worried that she was following the city rather than the science. She was wrong about that, and the error has defined her life. “I was excited to shift my focus to molecular neuroscience in the Jaffrey lab, I worried that my choice was driven more by a desire to live in New York than by a fair evaluation of all my options,” she recalls. “However, it proved transformative; not only did the Jaffrey lab provide the training for my seminal discoveries and the foundation for my own laboratory, but I also met my husband and started my family here.”
Inside the Jaffrey lab, Dr. Colak uncovered an RNA-directed silencing mechanism implicated in Fragile X Syndrome. The finding reframed her ambitions. A laboratory bench could not, by itself, turn a molecular insight into a treatment. She launched her own group in 2015. She is now Associate Professor at the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute and at the Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children’s Health, a dual appointment that places her at the interface of molecular neuroscience and pediatric medicine.
What Scientific Excellence Leaves Out
Dr. Colak’s current work focuses on how non-neuronal astrocytes and RNA degradation pathways regulate brain function and behavior, with autism and schizophrenia as the conditions she most wants to understand. Her group combines genetically engineered mouse models with human stem cell-derived brain organoids. The goal is to define what she calls the molecular signatures of these disorders, to see how breakdowns in local protein synthesis and cell-to-cell communication might surface, eventually, as the behaviors that send patients and families to clinics.
Ask her what she enjoys most about running a laboratory and she answers without hedging. “What I enjoy most is the opportunity to question long-standing dogmas and to investigate neglected areas of research.” The interview suggests she means it. Pressed on what the scientific community should examine about itself, she offers a sharp critique of how merit is currently tallied.
“Scientific excellence is often measured through a narrow lens that overvalues high-impact journals and quantitative ‘basic science,’ often at the expense of locally relevant research and clinical expertise,” she argues. “True transformation requires moving beyond these reductive metrics toward holistic frameworks that prioritize qualitative expert judgment and the diverse societal impacts of global research.”
It is not a fashionable position inside institutions that still rank themselves by impact factor. It is worth noting that a scientist whose own training ran through Max Planck, Helmholtz, and Weill Cornell is making it.
A Private Fear, Plainly Named
Dr. Colak identifies as her greatest achievement the crossing of systemic barriers and a lack of resources in order to pursue higher education, finding the opportunities abroad that built both the science and the family. Her heroes are trailblazer women. The living person she most admires is Malala Yousafzai. Her favorite occupations are traveling, running, and skiing. She lives in Tenafly, New Jersey.
Asked about her greatest fear, she does not reach for the abstract. “I harbor a quiet, persistent fear of an unfinished story,” she says, “of not being there to witness my children’s transition into adulthood.” It is the sort of sentence that sits differently on the page when you remember that her laboratory is built around children’s brains.
Her motto is likewise plain. Appreciate what you have while you work on what you want. She would live, given the choice, in a Mediterranean town. She treasures non-digital childhood photographs, her college-era jeans, and the first drawings and videos of her daughters. She is, in her own description, determined and energetic, working to be less of a perfectionist so that time goes further.
Somewhere inside all of that, the boy on the balcony is still watching.
Dr. Dilek Colak’s Genomic Press interview is part of a larger series called Innovators and Ideas that highlights the people behind today’s most influential scientific breakthroughs. Each interview in the series offers a blend of cutting-edge research and personal reflections, providing readers with a comprehensive view of the scientists shaping the future. By combining a focus on professional achievements with personal insights, this interview style invites a richer narrative that both engages and educates readers. This format provides an ideal starting point for profiles that explore the scientist’s impact on the field, while also touching on broader human themes. More information on the research leaders and rising stars featured in our Innovators and Ideas – Genomic Press Interview series can be found on our interview website: https://interviews.genomicpress.com/.
The Genomic Press Interview in Genomic Psychiatry titled “Dilek Colak: How do glial cells achieve multiple functions, and how do they contribute to neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric diseases?,” is freely available via Open Access, starting on 5 May 2026 in Genomic Psychiatry at the following hyperlink: https://doi.org/10.61373/gp026k.0030.
About Genomic Psychiatry: Genomic Psychiatry: Advancing Science from Genes to Society (ISSN: 2997-2388, online and 2997-254X, print) represents a paradigm shift in genetics journals by interweaving advances in genomics and genetics with progress in all other areas of contemporary psychiatry. Genomic Psychiatry publishes peer-reviewed medical research articles of the highest quality from any area within the continuum that goes from genes and molecules to neuroscience, clinical psychiatry, and public health.
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Living in the fast-paced heart of New York City puts one right where global cultures collide, creating a unique energy that is a reminder of how diverse people and bold ideas come together to solve the world’s biggest health mysteries.
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Dilek Colak
Dilek Colak: How do glial cells achieve multiple functions, and how do they contribute to neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric diseases?
Credit
Dilek Colak
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Genomic Psychiatry
Method of Research
News article
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Dilek Colak: How do glial cells achieve multiple functions, and how do they contribute to neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric diseases?
Article Publication Date
5-May-2026
Research aims to identify underlying causes for linked mental-health issues
University of Kansas
LAWRENCE — A researcher from the University of Kansas has led a large-scale study of university undergraduates to better understand how psychological conditions such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and eating disorders are connected.
The investigation, appearing in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, relied on the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP), an emerging alternative to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the traditional guide for diagnosing and treating patients.
The findings suggest HiTOP’s use of symptom dimensions may better support more precise, personalized mental health care.
“There are problems with the way we diagnose people with mental health issues,” said lead author Kelsie Forbush, professor of clinical child psychology at KU. “The current system is categorical, so you either have the mental health condition, or you don’t. That can be really problematic for a number of reasons, and it’s especially true for eating disorders.”
Forbush also pointed to concerns with the DSM, which is currently recommended by the American Psychological Association, including a tendency for disorders to be highly heterogeneous.
“There are numerous ways a person could meet criteria for a category,” Forbush said. “I believe there are 126 different ways a person could meet criteria for anorexia nervosa. So, in many cases, that yes-or-no label doesn’t really tell the clinician or therapist what is actually going on with a person. It’s also possible for somebody with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa to have the exact same symptoms in common, except for being at different body weights.”
Forbush said two clients can have completely different diagnostic labels but nearly identical symptoms. Under the DSM, she added, two people can also be assigned the same label with little symptom overlap.
“We also see an issue of diagnostic migration over time because of some of these issues,” Forbush said. “For example, we did a study several years ago where we found among people who were diagnosed with anorexia nervosa at baseline, one year later none of them had the same diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, but they all had an eating disorder.”
Under the DSM’s diagnostic system, Forbush said, small changes in symptom presentation can lead to a different diagnosis. Because of these issues, HiTOP has gained traction.
“People are wanting a system that is going to be more clinically helpful and also convey more information about prognosis,” she said. “That’s another issue we have with the current diagnostic system. When I get the label, I don’t know: Is this somebody who is at high risk or low risk? It’s just not very informative in that way.”
Alternatively, HiTOP uses dimensional systems rather than diagnostic categories. More specific subdimensions — such as fear, distress and eating pathology — are grouped under broader dimensions.
“These are dimensions instead of categories,” Forbush said. “One way I think of it is if you get your blood pressure taken or your weight taken, it’s a number anywhere along a range. And you can also say, ‘Oh, that’s high blood pressure,’ or ‘that’s a weight that the CDC would say is obesity,’ right?”
Using HiTOP, Forbush and her collaborators are developing a hierarchy of symptoms and relationships among symptoms to better understand what a person is experiencing.
“In our past research, we found that this dimensional system was much more predictive of things like whether somebody recovered, their psychiatric impairment, and how severe their mental health condition was even a year later,” Forbush said. “Whereas the current system, the DSM, didn’t predict very much, even when we looked at many disorders together.”
The study used data from a nationally representative sample of veterans that was collected at KU. All participants were veterans who had separated from their service branch within the previous six months.
The team analyzed how symptoms clustered together and identified “internalizing” as a broad, higher-order dimension reflecting a tendency toward inwardly directed distress. This hierarchical internalizing structure supports HiTOP over DSM-style diagnostic categories.
“I’d say the core of internalizing is a high propensity toward negative emotionality,” Forbush said. “So high levels of neuroticism — more likely to feel sad, down, anxious, just wired that way. Even negative temperament: some babies come out with a more negative temperament than others. That doesn’t mean they’ll develop disorders, but it makes it more likely. So it’s really about treating that core negative emotionality. If that is treated well, the hope is people won’t develop more disorders within that domain over time.”
