Betül Kaçar

Betül Kaçar is an Assistant Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Arizona. She is a NASA Early Career Fellow.

Education
Kacar was born in Istanbul, where she attended Cavusoglu High School. Her parents were immigrants to Istanbul from the Black Sea region, and no women in her family had received a formal education. She studied Chemistry at Marmara University, but was dissatisfied with the amount of free time in her schedule and began to volunteer. Whilst volunteering at an international meeting about Alzheimer's, she learned about how the molecular properties of enzymes could change with age. This inspired her to apply to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where she spent a summer conducting scientific research in Emory University. She returned to Emory University in 2004, and eventually earned a PhD in Biomolecular Chemistry in 2010.

Career
Kaçar is interested in how we can understand the molecular mechanisms of evolution. She was award a NASA postdoctoral fellowship, followed by an Early Career Fellowship and funding from the NASA Astrobiology Institute and Exobiology Branch. She was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010. In 2011 she became a member of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science.

She joined Harvard University in 2012, where worked in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. Here she looked to identify how to reconstruct historical enzymatic intermediates between global geochemical reservoirs and biological activity. She appeared on the Science for the Public, where she spoke about trying to reconstruct ancient genes about how they developed over millions of years. At Harvard, Kaçar managed to revive an ancient protein and managed to get it to evolve inside a Escherichia coli. She is a member of the Harvard Origins Initiative.

In 2017 Kaçar was appointed to University of Arizona, where she is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Molecular and Cell Biology. She is also an Associate Professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Her husband, Zach Adam, works in the Lunar and Planetary Institute. She has been described as a "prominent member" of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. She has received over $1 million of grant funding.

Kaçar is interested in public engagement and outreach. During her PhD she began to translate articles about evolution into other languages. In 2012 she co-founded SAGANet, an astrobiology social network. She is on the Board of Advisory Committee of the MIT BioBuilder Foundation. In 2016 she was named Way Cool Scientist by the Science Club for Girls. Her work has featured on PBS. She was interviewed in the magazine Turk of America.