Ali Can received both his B.Sc. degree (2016) and M.Sc degree (2019) from Izmir Institute of Technology, the leading institute that maintains a strong emphasis on the natural sciences and engineering and is the only institute of its kind in Turkey, with a special focus on scientific research. The topic of his master thesis was investigating the cellular mechanosensing differences between cancer and epithelial cells by using lab-on-a-chip technology. Additionally, during his master's degree, he was one of the authors in a scientific paper called “Cellular distribution of invadopodia is regulated by nanometer scale surface protein patterns" published in the European Journal of Cell Biology (2017).

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In the MONPLAS project, his role is to investigate the ingestion, fate, and impacts of microplastics and nanoplastics to living cells and on model organisms. For this purpose, he is using several cell culture lines, cytotoxicity and cell viability bioassays, different reporter gene assay (RGA) cell lines responsive to endocrine hormones, and he is also looking at various markers such as markers responsible for inflammation.

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