About Placebo Center Team

Dr. Cuneyt Tegin is a board-certified psychiatrist and addiction medicine specialist with a deep interest in the mind-body connection, meaning-centered healing, and the clinical application of placebo science. Dr. Tegin leads interdisciplinary efforts to understand how expectation, context, and therapeutic relationships shape medical outcomes, especially in mental health care.

With extensive clinical experience and a background in both evidence-based medicine and integrative approaches, Dr. Tegin’s work explores the ethical use of placebo mechanisms to enhance healing without deception. His research focuses on placebo interventions, the role of belief and meaning in psychiatric treatment, and how clinical environments can be optimized for trust, engagement, and patient empowerment.

Based in California, Dr. Tegin also leads outpatient psychiatric programs and digital mental health initiatives, where insights from placebo research are translated into practical strategies for care delivery, technology design, and provider-patient communication.

He believes that understanding the placebo effect is essential to understanding the human dimensions of healing, and that doing so can help bridge the science of medicine with the art of compassionate care.

Dr. Kateryna Koval earned a medical degree in 2016 and has since developed a diverse clinical background. In Ukraine, she simultaneously practiced in three specialties: as an adult psychiatrist and psychotherapist in a women’s complex rehabilitation department, and as a child and adolescent psychiatrist in a unit for patients aged 12 to 18. In addition to her clinical roles, she volunteered as a psychiatrist providing mental health care to victims of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

After obtaining medical licensure in Poland, she worked at the Jagiellonian University Hospital, further expanding her international clinical experience. Her professional skills include managing therapeutic relationships, maintaining both paper and electronic medical records, prescribing psychiatric medications, and presenting cases in hospital medical advisory boards.

Dr. Koval has also contributed to academic medicine, participating in research and publishing papers during medical school. She served as a part-time editor for a scientific medical journal.

Currently based in California, she is in the process of obtaining her U.S. medical license. She is also involved in coordinating placebo-related research, driven by a deep interest in the therapeutic potential of the placebo effect. She believes that a better understanding of this phenomenon could reduce reliance on medication and help unlock the body’s innate capacity for healing.

Dr. Nalan Varsak is a psychiatrist with a clinical background and a growing interest in the mechanisms that influence treatment outcomes, including the placebo effect. She earned her medical degree in Turkey and completed her residency in psychiatry, where she worked with patients facing complex psychiatric conditions in both inpatient and outpatient settings. Her career has included service in public hospitals under resource-limited conditions, where she often had to rely on clinical insight and therapeutic alliances to support patients with limited access to formal therapies.

Dr. Varsak has broadened her clinical and academic perspective through international observerships, including at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Metropolitan State Hospital in Los Angeles. These experiences deepened her curiosity about how expectations and context influence outcomes across cultures and health systems. Her interest in the placebo effect began during her clinical years, as she observed how patients’ expectations, trust in their physicians, and the therapeutic setting significantly influenced their responses to treatment, even in the absence of pharmacological change.

As a contributor to this project, Dr. Varsak is currently focused on identifying and analyzing studies that explore the role of placebo in psychiatry and other fields, aiming to highlight its overlooked role in healing.

Eda Nur Demirag, MD is a medical doctor with a dedicated focus on psychiatry and the neurocognitive mechanisms that shape mind-body interactions. She obtained her medical degree from Georgian National University SEU in 2024. During her clinical training, she completed an internship at Izmir Tınaztepe University Hospital and actively participated in several academic symposia, including an advanced workshop on Emotion Regulation.

Currently preparing for the USMLE, Dr. Demirag plans to pursue residency training in psychiatry in the United States. As a researcher at the Placebo Center, she is particularly interested in the placebo effect, not merely as a control condition, but as a powerful psychobiological phenomenon that reflects the brain’s capacity to influence perception, emotion, and symptom modulation. Her work explores how therapeutic expectation, belief, and context may be ethically and scientifically integrated into psychiatric treatment models to enhance clinical outcomes.

 I am an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, double majoring in Cognitive Science and Data Science, with academic interests at the intersection of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and medicine. 

My research experience spans clinical psychiatry studies, advanced neuroimaging with MEG, and predictive modeling in healthcare, and finally into placebo research, which demonstrates the profound role of the mind in medicine.

What excites me about placebo research is that it forces us to question the very nature of healing. I explore how the mind interacts with physiology in ways that challenge our definitions of “reality”. Placebo research uncovers the hidden role of consciousness in health. It shows that medicine is not only about the physiological change, but also about meaning; the story we tell ourselves about being cared for, the hope we attach to treatment, and the rituals that embody healing.

I want to continue building on this foundation by pursuing research that bridges clinical practice and scientific discovery, exploring how mind–body interactions can inform new treatments, improve patient care, and expand our understanding of consciousness in medicine.