University Executive Board

Barış Tan received his bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Boğaziçi University. He earned his M.E. degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering, M.S.E. Graduate Certificate in Manufacturing Systems, and Ph.D. in Operations Research at the University of Florida. From 1994 to 2024, he served as a professor of Business Administration and Industrial Engineering, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of the College of Administrative Sciences and Economics, and Director of the Graduate School of Business at Koç University. On March 1, 2024, he joined Özyeğin University as a professor of Industrial Engineering and Business Administration. He was appointed as President on July 26, 2024. His areas of expertise include the design and control of production systems, supply chain management, and stochastic modelling. Prof. Tan has numerous publications and projects in these fields. Barış Tan is the recipient of the Turkish Academy of Sciences Distinguished Young Scholar Award, the TUBITAK fellowship, the NATO Science Fellowship, as well as best paper awards for his publications. Prof. Tan has served as a visiting faculty member at Harvard MIT, University of Cambridge, University College London, and Politecnico di Milano. He continues to contribute to advisory and management boards of various universities and institutions around the world.

Prof. Dr. Okan Örsan Özener received his B.Sc (2001) and M.S. (2003) degrees in Industrial Engineering from Middle East Technical University. In 2006, he obtained his M.S. degree in Operations Research and in 2008 his Ph. D in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He worked as a research assistant at Middle East Technical University between 2001 and 2003, and at Georgia Institute of Technology between 2003 and 2008. His research interests are in data science, data-driven optimization, integer/combinatorial optimization, machine learning, non-cooperative/cooperative game theory and supply chain management applications. Prof. Özener has been a faculty member in the Department of Industrial Engineering since 2008 and has served as the Head of the Department of Industrial Engineering between 2012-2022 and as the Vice Dean of the Engineering Faculty from 2022-2024. He was appointed as Deputy Dean of The Faculty of Engineering and Deputy Director Graduate School of Engineering as of January 2025.

Prof. Dr. Ali İzzet Tekcan completed his undergraduate education in psychology at Boğaziçi University in 1989. He received his MA in cognitive psychology in 1996 and his PhD in 1996 from The American University (Washington, DC). He worked as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Boğaziçi University between 1998 and 2024, during which time he served as Department Head (2010-2012, 2022-2023), Dean of Students (2004-2006), and Vice Rector for Academic Affairs (2012-2021). He was a visiting researcher at the University of Leeds in 2008-2009 and at Aarhus University in 2010 and 2018. He has received the TÜBA Outstanding Young Scientist Award (2001), the Outstanding Achievement in Research Award (2001) and the Outstanding Achievement in Teaching Award (2020) from the Boğaziçi University Foundation. His research interests include autobiographical and social memory processes, self-memory relationship, and memory processes in psychopathologies. Prof. Dr. Tekcan joined the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Özyeğin University in February 2024 and was appointed as a Senate Member in September 2024. As of July 16th 2026, he was appointed as Acting Dean of Faculty of Social Sciences.

Prof. Dr. Mehmet Burçin Ünlü received his BSc and MSc degrees in Physics from Middle East Technical University (METU) in 1996 and Boğaziçi University in 1998, respectively. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 2004. He then worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of California, Irvine in the Tu & Yuen Functional Onco-Imaging lab (Department of Radiological Sciences, School of Medicine) for five years. During his postdoctoral studies, he focused on medical imaging and medical physics. Between 2009-2023, he was a faculty member in the Physics Department at Boğaziçi University, serving as department head from 2018-2020 and 2022-2023. In 2017-2018, he worked at the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Biomedical Physics at Stanford University for one year with the support of a Fulbright scholarship. Additionally, he spent 6 months at the Hokkaido University School of Medicine working on proton therapy research. He maintains an ongoing collaboration with the Hokkaido University Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Medicine. In 2023, Dr. Ünlü relocated the Laboratory of Medical and Biological Physics from Boğaziçi University, which he founded in 2012, to the Faculty of Engineering at Özyeğin University. His areas of expertise include medical and biomedical physics, medical imaging, image formation algorithms, biological physics, and computational cancer biology. As of October 2023, Dr. Ünlü was appointed as Acting Dean of Faculty of Aviation and Aeronautical Science.

Prof. Dr. Özlem Yenerer Çakmut started her undergraduate education at Istanbul University Faculty of Law in 1988 and completed it in 1992. She completed her Master's Degree, which she started at Marmara University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Public Law, by successfully presenting her thesis titled "Search in Criminal Procedure Law and Immunity of Housing". Afterwards, she earned the right to do her doctorate in Marmara University Social Sciences Institute Public Law Department, and in this process, she completed her doctoral thesis named "Examination of Consent to Medical Intervention in terms of Criminal Law", during which she did research in Germany (Freiburg in Brs. and Cologne). In 1994, she started to work as a Research Assistant at Marmara University, Faculty of Law, Department of Criminal and Criminal Procedure Law; she was appointed as Assistant Professor in 2003. She completed her associate professorship work on "Determination of Pedigree and the Crime of Changing the Child's Pedigree" and passed the Associate Professorship Colloquium, which she entered in 2009, unanimously, and received the title of Associate Professor. She became a Professor in 2014 with her Professorship titled "Disturbing the Peace and Tranquillity of People and Noise Crimes". Prof. Çakmut has published works and presentations in her field. She has been working at Özyeğin University Faculty of Law since 2012. As of February 2022, she took up the position of Dean.

Prof. Dr. Aslıhan Ünlü graduated from Istanbul Technical University (ITU) with a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture in 1986 and completed her Master’s and PhD degrees from the same institution. She continued her academic career at ITU between 1988-2020 where she received “Full Professorship” in 2014. Dr. Ünlü completed her postdoc research project titled “Energy and Visual Performance Appraisal of Electrochromic Windows Integrated with Overhangs in Different Climates” at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory of the University of California between 2003-2004. Being a Fulbright Fellow, she worked and taught as a Visiting Professor at Roger Williams University, School of Architecture, Art and Historic Preservation at Bristol, Rhode Island between 2012-2013. Her main research areas focus on sustainable building technologies and construction, high performance façade & window systems and her research articles have been published nationally and internationally. She has supervised several master and PhD studies. Dr. Unlu worked as the ITU coordinator of EU Erasmus Strategic Partnership Project "Re-use of modernist buildings - RMB" which was completed on September 2019. In addition, she is an editorial board member of Facade Design and Engineering (JFDE), a member of European Facade Network (EFN), a member of Turkish Chamber of Architects, Association of Architecture Education (ArchEd), National Association of Environmental Control.

Prof. Dr. Gökhan Özertan earned his undergraduate degree in Economics from Boğaziçi University in 1994 and obtained his PhD in Agricultural Economics from Texas A&M University in 2001. He was a faculty member in the Department of Economics at Boğaziçi University between 2001-2025. Throughout his career, he has held visiting positions at the University of Massachusetts Boston (2009–2010) and the Central Bank of Turkey (2016–2017). Prof. Dr. Özertan has led projects funded by EU PRIMA, TÜBİTAK, various Turkish ministries, the UNDP, and the UK Prosperity Fund. In 2019, he participated in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Cochran Fellowship Program. Additionally, he served as the rapporteur for the Copyrights Section of Turkey’s Eleventh Development Plan. He served as the Chairman of the Working Group of the IV. Agricultural Council in 2025. His research focuses on modelling agricultural and environmental processes, the role of technology in agriculture, the impacts of climate change, commodity price dynamics, and the economic implications of intellectual property rights and regulations in the IT sector. He teaches microeconomics, statistics, econometrics, economics of innovation, agricultural economics, and environmental economics at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He started his position as a Professor in the Department of Economics at Özyeğin University on July 1, 2025, and as of October 2025, he has been appointed as the Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences.

Prof. Dr. Işıl Erol received her Bachelor's degree in City and Regional Planning from Middle East Technical University (METU) in 1998 and completed her first Master's degree in Economics at the same university in 2000. In 2001, she obtained a second Master’s degree in Land Economy from the University of Cambridge. She earned her Ph.D. in Real Estate Economics from the University of Cambridge in 2004. Dr. Erol served as an Assistant Professor at METU between 2005 and 2010 and as an Associate Professor from 2010 to 2013. In 2009, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Adelaide. From 2013 to 2018, she worked as an Associate Professor at Özyeğin University. She then held Associate Professor positions at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia between 2018 and 2021, and at the University of Reading in the UK between 2021 and 2022. Dr. Erol has worked as a real estate consultant for the World Bank and has led various research projects supported by the World Bank Group, the European Union, and TÜBİTAK. These projects focused on topics such as the financialization of housing markets, financing of urban regeneration projects, housing affordability, spatial analysis of commercial properties, and pricing of fixed-rate mortgage loans in inflationary economies. Since August 2022, Prof. Dr. Erol has been serving as a Professor in the Department of International Finance at the Faculty of Business and as the academic director of the Alp Alkaş Retail and Real Estate Center, one of the university’s research centers. Since February 2023, she has also been a member of the University Executive Board.

Prof. Akdoğa received his Physics and Electrical Engineering undergraduate degrees from Boğaziçi University in 1995. As a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, he worked on the DONUT experiment at the Fermi National Laboratory, which made the first direct observation of tau-neutrino in 1998. He received his Ph.D. degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in experimental nuclear physics in 2003 with a thesis titled pion production in neutron-proton interactions. He continued his research at MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science as a postdoctoral associate from 2003 to 2004. He contributed to the BLAST program at MIT-Bates Laboratory, which studied the electromagnetic structure of the nucleons and the deuteron and contributed to several experiments at LANSCE utilizing neutron beams to study the nucleon-nucleon systems. He was promoted to the Research Scientist position at MIT in 2004. Then, he joined the Department of Physics at Boğaziçi University in 2006 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor and Full Professor in 2008 and 2013, respectively. His research area has primarily been nuclear and particle physics and computational physics. He served as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences between 2014-2016 at Boğaziçi University. He established the Linguistic Department and Humanities Courses Coordination Unit during his tenure. Dr. Akdoğa joined Özyeğin University as a full-time faculty member in 2018. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Director of the Graduate School of Engineering and Sciences between 2018-2022. He established several graduate programs, including the MS program in Data Science and the MS program in Artificial Intelligence, during his tenure. He served as the rector's advisor between 2021-2024.

Prof. Dr. Hülya Turgut, having a bachelor’s degree of Architecture, a Master of Architecture and a Doctor of Architecture from Istanbul Technical University, worked as an academician at the department of Architecture in Istanbul Technical University between 1984 and 2010. In addition, she studied at the Joint Centre for Urban Design in the Department of Architecture in Oxford Brookes University, England (1987) as a research fellow, and worked in the Center for Environmental Design Research in California University, Berkeley as a Visiting Scholar (1996). Dr. Turgut, working as a professor since 1998 at ITU, worked as a vice rector in charge of infrastructure, building investments and management and as well as an advisory of rectorship. Between 2012- 2015, she worked as a Director of the Interior Architecture Department at Faculty of Architecture and Design at Maltepe University. Prof. Dr. Turgut has been working as a faculty member at Özyeğin University Faculty of Architecture and Design since September 2015. Having served as a Senate Member since November 2016, Turgut served as Co-Chair of the Executive Board of Özyeğin University and TÜSİAD-SKF Sustainable Development Platform between 2017 and 2021.

Turgut, who conducts research and publications in the fields of “Architectural Design Education, Culture and Space Studies, Traditional and Contemporary Housing, City: Change and Transformations”, is also the coordinator of the ‘OZU_UHL’ Urban and Housing Research Laboratory. In addition to her academic studies, Turgut continues her professional architectural studies; she has various building design and applications, jury memberships and awards in architectural project competitions nationally and internationally.

She is a joint co-coordinator of the IAPS-CS ‘Culture and Space’ Network; under the framework of this network, she has been chairing “International Culture and Space Symposium Series“and organizing “Culture and Space Design Workshops and Student Competitions”. Dr. Turgut is a co-editor of IAPS-CSBE Network Book Series. Dr. Turgut has been the coordinator of the International IAPS-CS ‘Culture and Space’ network since 1997; within this framework, she is the scientific chair of the international ‘Culture and Space’ meetings and the editor of the book series; She has also been running the student activities of the network since 2012; within this scope, she organizes symposiums, article selections, design competitions and workshops.