Ekin received his BSc. degree in biology in 2010 and continued his graduate education with a MSc. degree in Organismic, Evolutionary and Paleobiology from the University of Bonn. Both his bachelor’s and master’s research was conducted in the lab of Prof. Dr. Heike Wägele at the Zoological Research Museum Koenig. He studied the evolution of symbiosis between the nudibranch genus Phyllodesmium and photosynthetic zooxanthellae (Symbiodinium) and the acquisition and use of cnidocytes in aeolid nudibranchs. He then joined the lab of Prof. Dr. Thomas Bartolomaeus and started working on annelids, investigating the formation and ultrastructure of chaetae. His PhD research, utilized a wide range of morphological approaches like imunohistochemistry, electron microscopy, histology and 3D modeling. In his PhD thesis he investigated the formation and ultrastructure of annelid chaetae.
After receiving his Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) degree in December 2015, he continued his work in Bonn as a postdoc until joining the Rouse Lab in Scripps Institution of Oceanography as a postdoctoral research fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in May, 2017. He is currently working on a global phylogeny of feather duster worms (Sabellidae) with a focus on body size and life history evolution. His research uses phylogenomic methods to help uncover the evolutionary relationships of polychaete taxa, while studying their morphology using a variety of bioimaging techniques.
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