Welcome!

My name is Anne Yilmaz (she/her) and I’m a memory researcher in the Wixted Laboratory at UC San Diego’s  Department of Psychology. My Ph.D is in Experimental Psychology with Specialization in Anthropogeny.

I do basic memory science with application to the eyewitness memory realm. My research interests include: episodic memory, recognition, long-term memory, perceptual decision-making, confidence, and signal detection theory. I teach upper-division undergraduate courses at UC San Diego on similar topics.

While in graduate school, I was affiliated with the Center of Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA). CARTA is a highly-interdisciplinary program that aims to 1) bring researchers together to answer questions pertaining to the origin of Homo sapiens and 2) provide researchers with an evolutionary lens that can be used when approaching their own work.

Outside of my work life, I’m a San Diego, Calif. native who is loving being back in my hometown. I spend an overwhelming majority of my free time outdoors either hiking, surfing or doing yoga. Also, I enjoy participating in community events; you can often find me doing a beach clean-up with our local Surfrider chapter.

Before starting graduate school, I worked for various news publications and hold over a dozen national awards in journalism (including winning the highest national award in student journalism in 2010 and being a finalist for the same award in 2015). You can find my old clips on this site. Although I no longer work in journalism, I keep my articles hosted here so that the subjects of these stories are able to access them easily and, separate from that, I think working as a reporter honed invaluable communication and investigative skills that I still use today. I swapped feature writing for scientific/academic writing, but my job is still using facts to tell a story for others.

If you’d like more information, please check out my CV or contact me.

Thank you for visiting,

– A.Y.