Canan Dagdeviren was born on May 4, 1985, in Üsküdar, Istanbul, as the first child of a mother from Adana and a father from Sivas. She has two siblings named Kaner and Emre. At the age of five, her interest in physics was sparked by a book about Marie Curie, which her father gifted her. As she grew up, she was inspired by the discoveries of Marie Curie’s husband, Pierre Curie, in the manufacturing of piezoelectric devices. After completing her primary and secondary education, she transferred to Kocaeli High School as a guest student after her school was damaged in the 1999 earthquake. She graduated from Hacettepe University in Ankara with a degree in Physics Engineering in 2007. She received a full scholarship at Sabancı University in Istanbul, where she completed her master’s program in Material Science and Engineering in 2009.

In the same year, she received a Fulbright scholarship and began her Ph.D. studies in Material Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the United States. During her doctoral studies, she worked on developing flexible and wearable electronic devices that can be adhered to the body or skin, which encompass fields of physics, electronics, and chemistry.

Canan Dagdeviren is considered one of the young talents in the scientific world in Turkey. She is fortunate to have the opportunity to work on projects at two of the best universities in the world simultaneously. She continues her research at the Koç Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is also a member of the Young Academy at Harvard University.