SENIOR RESEARCHERS

Dr. Merih Angın is an Assistant Professor at Koç University's College of Administrative Sciences and Economics, where she lectures at the International Relations Department, and Computational Social Sciences graduate program. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government of the University of Oxford, and a visiting scholar at the Mortara Center for International Studies of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Dr. Angın holds a Ph.D. degree in International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), an M.Sc. degree in International Relations from METU, and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Bilkent University. Her research interests lie in the areas of nternational political economy, international development, international financial institutions, investment arbitration, computational social science including agent-based modeling, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) governance. Her research on AI usage in social sciences has been awarded the EU's Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship, as well as the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey’s International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers.

Dr. Özge Karanfİl is an Assistant Professor at the Business Administration Department of Koç University. She holds a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici University, an M.Sc. in Physiology from McGill University, and a Ph.D. degree from MIT Sloan School of Management. With a background in industrial engineering, management, and health sciences, she is drawn to systemic problems of chronic nature, which encompass typical constraints and approaches with important managerial implications for the societal domain, coming from medical or non-medical contexts. Her training is multi-disciplinary; she has both collaborated and published with experts in management, systems sciences, health sciences, and engineering to solve complex managerial problems with important policy implications for the societal domain. One of Dr. Karanfil's main lines of research is the investigation of the universal problem of evidence-based development of sound and reliable clinical practice guidelines (CPGs). The theory and resulting models she builds are grounded in empirical evidence-base and use a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods and dataÖ

Dr. Pelin Angın is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU). She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Bilkent University. Between 2014-2016, she worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Researcher at Purdue. Her research interests lie in the fields of cloud computing and Internet of things (IoT) security, distributed systems, 5G networks, blockchain and machine learning. She is among the founding members of the Systems Security Research Laboratory and an affiliate of the Wireless Systems, Networks and Cybersecurity Laboratory at METU. She serves on the editorial boards of multiple journals on IoT and mobile computing. Her work in security has been published at high impact journals including IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Computers & Security and IEEE Access among others.  

Dr. Hakan Emekçi holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Hacettepe University, a Master’s in Finance degree from London Business School (LBS), and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU).  Dr. Emekci has worked for the Turkish Treasury for ten years. During this period, he prepared Medium Term Economic Plans of Turkey for periods 2012-2015 with Macro-Economic Modeling Team and negotiated macroeconomic framework with IMF in the context of Article IV consultations. He represented Turkey in several international organizations including G20, EU, Responsible Finance Forum.

He is co-author of the book “Data Analysis with R” written in Turkish and gave “Data Mining with R” lectures to Auditors at Ankara Social Sciences University. His research interests lie in the areas of macro-economic modeling, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Dr. Gökhan Ş. Güneş is a Research Assistant Professor at Bahcesehir University Center for Economic and Social Research (BETAM). He holds a Ph.D degree in Economics from Koç University. His research areas include monetary policy applications, their impacts on financial markets, and sentiment analysis. 

Daniele Aglio is a Ph.D. student at the Economics Department of Koç University. He holds an M.Sc. degree in Economics from Bocconi University and Université catholique de Louvain. His research interests lie in the areas of Applied Macroeconomics and Labour Economics, and his doctoral research focuses on monetary policy and heterogeneity of firms, with theoretical extensions of New Keynesian models.  During his academic studies, he worked as an intern at the OECD and as a research consultant at the European Central Bank. He currently manages a study centre on economic and social issues in his hometown in Italy.

Sinan Akgünay is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Political Science and Public Administration Department of Middle East Technical University. He holds an M.Sc. degree in Financial Engineering from Boğazici University and Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Bilkent University. His research interests lie in international political economy and public policy with specific focus on global finance policy, regulatory governance and, institutional and policy change. His current research topics include the global governance of multilateral lending and the multidimensional impacts of China’s global finance policy. Akgunay has a 7-year professional experience in the financial sector as a banker and consultant. He is the Co-Founder of ‘Mesele Ekonomi’, a research-based economics oriented online media platform and of XYZ Interactive, a public policy oriented digital communications company.

Gülce Elif Atabey is a Master’s student at the International Relations Department of the Koç University. She holds a High Honor Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Bilkent University. She was an exchange student at the Pontificia Comillas University of Madrid. She had a number of internship experiences in state institutions such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey as well as academic institutions such as CFPPR. She was an executive member of the Bilkent International Relations and EU Politics Society (BIEST) during her undergraduate studies. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy with a particular focus on the political economy of development, emerging and rising powers.

Ayça Deniz is a PhD candidate in Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University. She received her M.Sc. degree at the same department in 2016, and B.S. degree in Computer Engineering at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in 2012. Her research interests include machine learning, evolutionary algorithms, and natural language processing. During her academic studies, she worked as a software engineer in the IT sector for more than four years.

Mustafa Yahşi is a Ph.D. student at the Economics Department of Koç University. He holds an M.Sc. degree in Economics and Management of Science from Humboldt University of Berlin and a B.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering from Boğaziçi University. His research areas are Experimental Economics, Behavioral Economics and Machine Learning.

Arif Akkan is a senior undergraduate student at the Economics Department of Koç University and he has a double major in Mathematics. He has track programs of Mathematical Economics and Macroeconomic Policy, and he has also taken courses on international relations. He worked as a research assistant for Berna Tuncay and as a teaching assistant for Levent Koçkesen. His research interests are economic inequality, public policy, international political economy, game theory and econometrics.

Deniz Aycan is a senior undergraduate student at the International Relations Department of Koç University. She is doing a double major in Economics and a minor in Sociology at the same university. She has been working with Prof. Ziya Öniş on the subjects of the political economy of right-wing populism and protests. Her research interests include Public Policy, International Political Economy, Socioeconomic Development, Sustainability, and Environmental Governance. She started to develop her computational skills by learning Python to use in NLP research. She is also a fellow at Global Learning and Leadership Program for Sustainability and had internship experience in the sustainability consultancy field.

Simay Küçükkolbaşı is a senior undergraduate student at Koç university. Her majors are International Relations and Economics. She studied political science at University of Exeter for her Erasmus programme. She has been studying political economy of right wing populism and Turkish foreign policy with Prof. Dr. Ziya Onis as a research assistant. Also, she has studied politics and science relationship in the context of Covid-19 as a researcher at Sabanci University. Her research interests lie in the areas of International Political Economy, Economic Methodology, Economic Growth and Development. 

Anıl is a senior undergraduate student at the Economics Department of Koç University. He is doing a double major in Business Administration and a minor in International Relations and MAVA. He has been working with Assistant Professor Sevcan Yesiltas as a research assistant about public sentiment analysis by collecting data from Twitter. He has been learning Python since last year. He believes that different perspectives of these disciplines will positively affect academic studies. His research interests include Political Economy, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Behavioral Economics.

Alper Tanrıverdi is a junior Political Science and Public Administration student at Middle East Technical University.  He is also an Economics minor program student at the same university. He is one of the alumni of Data Science for the Public Good Program, founded by the University of Virginia and coordinated by TED University Center for Applied Data Science. His research interests are International Political Economy, Labor Market, and Migration.