Pinar Alayoglu, Ph.D. is a research scientist in the accelerated methodologies group at the Materials Discovery Research Institute. She works in both the automation lab and the x-ray characterization lab, connecting high-throughput synthesis with characterization to accelerate material discovery.

Alayoglu brings a broad background across multiple chemistry disciplines, including computational, medicinal, materials, and inorganic chemistry. Her research in the U.S. began with developing cancer drugs at San Francisco State University, then broadened to creating multinuclear clusters and synthesizing nanoparticles for catalysis and imaging applications at the University of California, Berkeley. Her Ph.D. work focused on the synthesis, isolation, characterization, density functional theory, and diffraction anomalous fine structure studies of multicopper clusters. Her research aimed to obtain site-specific information on these homovalent clusters and to unravel insights into their reactivity. Alayoglu joined the Materials Discovery team in 2024.

Alayoglu holds an M.S. in chemistry from California State University, East Bay and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the University of Illinois at Chicago.