Sevinc received her BS from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. During her PhD, she worked with Robert Simpson and Jerry Workman on chromatin structure and recombination in yeast. She did her postdoctoral research with Jason Lieb at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. There, she found that the condensin-like dosage compensation complex represses transcription by binding to transcriptionally active promoters on the X chromosome in C. elegans. Currently Sevinc studies the molecular mechanisms by which Structural Maintenance of Chromosomes (SMC) protein complexes that include condensin and cohesin regulate chromosome structure and transcription.