Dilek Uslu works as a PhD research assistant of the UNESCO Chair on Gender Equality and Sustainable Development at Koc University. She completed her BA degree in Psychology at Ozyegin University and started combined PhD program in Social&Organizational Psychology. Her doctoral thesis is about minding the gender gap in leadership positions and developing women’s leadership skills. Her main research interests are gender gap in leadership positions, brief social psychological interventions, and optimized effectiveness of organizational training programs.

Irina Criveț is a Ph.D. candidate at the Koç University Public Law programme, where she researches the dynamics of compliance with international human rights law. She earned a BA in Public Administration with high honours from Ovidius University of Constantza, Romania in 2013, and an LL.M. in Public Law from Koç University in 2016. Her master’s thesis, “Implementing the General Measures of the European Court of Human Rights Judgments: A Case Study of Moldova”, was written under the supervision of Professor Başak Çalı. She is also a reporter on the Human Rights Law reporting project for Oxford Public International Law hosted by Koc University’s Centre for Global Public Law, and a Newton Ph.D. fellow on the British Academy- funded project “The Effects of International Human Rights Law on Public International Law and its Sub-Branches.” Recently, Ms. Criveț was selected as Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Gender Studies KOC-KAM and the UNESCO Chair on Gender Equality and Sustainable Development at Koç University.

Dr. Valentina Rita Scotti works as Post-doctoral Researcher in Comparative Public Law at the Koç University Law School since 2016. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Public Law from the University of Siena, Italy and a M.A. summa cum laude in International Relations at the LUISS ‘Guido Carli’. She has been Post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Political Science of LUISS ‘Guido Carli’ University of Rome (2012-2016), where she also worked as Research Assistant during her Ph.D. At LUISS, she has hold classes as Adjunct Professor in Comparative Constitutional Law and in Institutions of Muslim Countries at the LUISS. She has also hold classes in several Italian and international courses as well as at the Jean Monnet Summer School “Parliamentary Democracy in Europe” and the Jean Monnet Winter School on “The Parliaments of Europe in Democracy Promotion and Constitutional Transitions”.

Research Interests: International Human Rights Law, Business and Human Rights

İlayda Eskitaşcioğlu graduated from Bilkent University’s Faculty of Law (LL.B., 2016, cum laude) Leiden University’s European and International Human Rights Law Advanced Studies Master’s Programme. (LL.M., 2018, cum laude) She is an attorney at law at Ankara Bar Association and is currently a PhD student with a full scholarship at Koç University. She is a delegate at 2019 Stanford AMENDS Conference, she represented Türkiye at the G(irls20) Summit 2016 in Beijing and she is an active G(irls)20 Ambassador. She founded We Need to Talk initiative in 2016, which aims to empower rural women in Türkiye, through providing them access to sanitary materials and destroying the stigma around menstruation. Her academic interests are international human rights law, business and human rights, gender equality, sustainable development, women’s sexual and reproductive rights, and child labour.

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology at Koc University. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations from Middle East Technical University, Northern Cyprus Campus and a master’s degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from Sabanci University. I conduct my PhD research at Leadership Lab under the supervision of Prof. Zeynep Aycan. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, my doctoral research investigates the link between nonverbal communication and leadership. In my research, I focus on gender’s influence on individual’s judgment of leadership, which is driven from the first impressions.

Aysel Arslan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Archaeology and History of Art. She got her BA in Translation and Interpretation Studies at Boğaziçi University and her MA in the Department of Archaeology and History of Art at Koç University. Her MA thesis, Gendered Lifeways in Central Anatolia in the Neolithic and the Early Chalcolithic Periods (8500 – 5000 BC), assesses changes in gender roles from the beginning of the Neolithic when people first settled down and started changing their subsistence strategies until the end of the Early Chalcolithic when domestication of animals and plants became inextricably linked with everyday life in Central Anatolia. She examines anthropomorphic representations and mortuary practices through the lens of gender and suggests that there is change in the representations of gender towards the end of the Neolithic (after ca. 6500 BC). Her PhD research, Shaping Clay, Transmission of Knowledge: Division of Labor in the 7th and 6th Millennia in Western Anatolia, aims to understand gender and age-based division of labor in production of clay objects such as pottery, figurines and other miscellaneous clay finds in prehistoric Western Anatolia through fingerprint analysis. In her analysis, she examines and measures fingerprints left on such clay objects and identifies specific groups such as children, adult males or adult females in order to understand whether they especially participated in production of these objects or refrained from them.

MA Çetinkaya is a Ph.D. candidate, the coordinator of the Independent Evaluation Laboratory at Koç University, department of Psychology and the fellow of the UNESCO Chair. She studied Psychology at the İzmir University of Economics. She received her master’s degree in Social Psychology from Tilburg University. She is continuing her Ph.D. in Social and Organizational Psychology at Koç University under the supervision of Dr. Yasemin Kisbu-Sakarya. Broadly, her research program explores the impact of underrepresented identities (e.g., gender) on performance in academic context. She is also working on evidence-based interventions (i.e., brief social psychological interventions) to enhance educational outcomes for students from diverse backgrounds (e.g., women in STEM).

Pelin Kılınçarslan is a PhD candidate in Political Science and International Relations at Koç University where she has worked as a research and teaching assistant. She received her BA in Political Science from Bilkent University and her MA in International Relations from Koç University. She has held visiting researcher position in the Politics Department at the University of Manchester. She is currently working on her doctoral research which explores the gendered dimensions of household indebtedness, with fieldwork in Greece and Türkiye. Related to this, she has been granted Nermin Abadan-Unat Social Sciences Award, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TUBITAK) International Scholarship, and Dicle Koğacıoğlu Article Award. She worked as a training facilitator for a MATRA project in collaboration with the Center for Gender Studies at Koç University (KOÇ-KAM). She is also currently working as a research assistant for the ERC project “the New Politics of Welfare: Towards an ‘Emerging Markets’ Welfare State Regime” at Koç University. Her primary research interests are in feminist political economy with a focus on social reproduction and indebtedness, subjectivity formations, and financialization of everyday life.

Nazlı Kazanoğlu is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Gender Studies KOÇ-KAM and UNESCO Chair on Equality and Sustainable development at Koç University. She obtained her Ph.D. from Ulster University School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences in 2018 with her thesis entitled ‘The Politics of Europeanisation Patterns of Work and Family Life Reconciliation Policies: Germany and Türkiye’. She obtained her MSc from Istanbul Bilgi University. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology, obtained from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara. She spent 6 months in UC Berkeley as a visiting researcher during her master’s degree and a year in University of Bremen during her PhD. Her research interests lie in the areas of Europeanization studies, comparative welfare regime analysis, new-institutionalism theory, gender equality, social policy, employment policy, women’s employment and reconciliation of work and family life.

Bengü Kurtege Sefer currently works as a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Gender Studies KOÇ-KAM and the UNESCO Chair on Gender Equality and Sustainable Development at Koc University. She completed her BA degree in sociology at Bogazici University and received her MA degree from the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Bogazici University in the field of child criminology. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in sociology at the State University of New York, Binghamton on 2018. In her dissertation, she analyzed the impacts of the historically contingent processes of agrarian transition on landless peasant women and their political mobilization through land occupations in two Aegean villages in Türkiye in the 1960s with a gender and class specific perspective. Her main research interests are critical agrarian studies, rural women and development, labor history and peasant movements.

Gizem Türkaslan is a Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations and Political Science at Koc University in Istanbul, Türkiye. She holds a BA from Galatasaray University and an MSc from University College London. Her doctoral research focuses on women’s activism and their impact on citizenship regimes in Türkiye and in Tunisia from a comparative perspective. She conducted her fieldwork in Tunisia and in Türkiye with a research grant from KOC-KAM. She has also worked as a facilitator in a Project on women and leadership funded by the MATRA Social Transformation Program in collaboration with KOC-KAM. Her broader interests include citizenship studies, gender in the Middle East, women’s movements and feminist theory. Her work has recently been awarded first place in Nermin Abadan-Unat Social Sciences Awards and Dicle Kogacioglu Article Awards.

Dr. Cem Veziroğlu is an assistant professor at Koç University Law School Commercial Law Department, and he works as an affiliated scholar at the UNESCO Chair on Gender Equality and Sustainable Development. After graduating from Galatasaray University Law Faculty, he obtained his LL.M. degree ( magister juris) from the University of Oxford. Having pursued his doctoral studies in corporate law at Istanbul University, his dissertation entitled “ Contractual Freedom in Articles of Association and Its Limits in Joint Stock Company Law ” was published in 2021. He participated in various international projects funded by the European Union and British Council; and he co-authored project reports about social entrepreneurship within this context. His research interests include effects of sustainable development goals on corporate, banking and capital markets law; designing sustainable corporate models and sustainable finance instruments; environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG).

Ayşe Alnıaçık is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Gender Studies at Koç University. She completed her PhD in sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, where her research focused on politics of gender-based violence and feminist mobilization. This research has received support from Fulbright Scholarship for Foreign Students and University of Pittsburgh’s Social Science Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships and Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowships. During her PhD, Ayşe volunteered as a researcher at the Labor Studies Group in Turkey by compiling data and writing reports on workers' mobilizations. She also worked as a local consultant to the International Center for Research on Women, based in Washington, by conducting a fieldwork on care policies and workplace practices in Turkey. During her graduate study at the Boğaziçi University, Ayşe worked as a research assistant at the Social Policy Center at Koç University where she contributed to research projects on politics of social policy, women’s employment, vocational education, and household livelihood strategies. Some of her articles have appeared in Violence Against Women, Social Politics, Gender and Education, and New Perspectives on Turkey.