Ozyegin University (OZU), founded in 2007, is a non-profit foundation university in Istanbul. It is one of the most innovative and research-oriented universities in Turkey. OZU ranked in the top 8 in the most entrepreneurial and innovative Turkish universities index, prepared under the leadership of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), published by the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology in 2016. OZU has been ranked in the top ten for the last five years. OZU hosts six Faculties; three Graduate Schools; two Schools, and eight centers. The university has cooperated with many national and international institutions and its project portfolio exceeded 60 Million TL (about 17.1 Million Euros) for 327 projects as of December 2016. 43% of this budget comes from TÜBİTAK funds; 27%comes from the EU and the rest from industrial partnerships and other funding institutions. Between 2009 and 2016, OZU has filed 46 patent applications (16 national and 30 international) and 3 utility model registrations.
Susan Beth Rottmann
Dr. Susan Beth Rottmann is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Özyeğin University in Istanbul, Turkey. A migration expert with 10+ years of research experience, she has published in a wide variety of international peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Refugee Studies, Migration Studies and Critical Sociology. Her recent book, In Pursuit of Belonging: Forging an Ethical Life in European-Turkish Spaces (Berghahn Books - 2019) draws on the tradition of life story writing in anthropology to convey the struggle to forge an ethical life as a Muslim woman in transnational space. Dr. Rottmann was a Primary Investigator for the HORIZON 2020 project, RESPOND - Multilevel Governance of Mass Migration in Europe and Beyond between 2017-2021. In addition to GAPs, she is currently a Primary Investigator of the Horizon Europe project OppAttune - Countering Oppositional Political Extremism through Attuned Dialogue: Track, Attune, Limit (2023-2026). She also the Coordinator for a TÜBİTAK 1001 grant (The Scientific and Technological Research Projects Funding Program of Turkey) for the project, Food, Homemaking and Social Integration for Syrian Women in Istanbul, Gaziantep and Hatay.
University Webpage: https://www.ozyegin.edu.tr/en/faculty/susanrottmann
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0680-6999
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Susan-Rottmann-3
Maissam Nimer
Nimer is an assistant professor at Istanbul University, Faculty of Political Sciences, working at the intersection between migration governance and experiences, social and gender inequalities and development. Previously, she carried out work at Paris Nanterre University examining the way in which intellectual production is transformed by exile, and prior to that Koç University, and as a Mercator IPC fellow at Sabanci University, dealing with the experiences of Syrian refugee youth in Turkey and language learning. She obtained her PhD in July 2016 at Paris Saclay University. Her work has been published in international and regional academic journals including Gender and Education, Critical Sociology, Governance, Migration Studies, Third World Quarterly, Sociological Research Online, International Studies in Sociology of Education, Multilingua, Comparative Education Review as well as New Perspectives on Turkey, Idafat, Civil Society Review and New Middle East Studies Journal. She was awarded the BAGEP 2023 award (Science Academy’s Young Scientist Awards Program) and 2022 TÜBİTAK Incentive Award (2022 TÜBİTAK Teşvik Ödülü) in recognition of her research contribution.
Fatma Elmas
Fatma Yılmaz-Elmas is a post-doctoral researcher affiliated with Ozyegin University for the EU funded GAPs project. Dr. Yılmaz-Elmas is also a lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, İstanbul Bilgi University. She got her Ph.D. in International Relations/European Studies from Ankara University with a dissertation on the EU migration-foreign policy nexus, for which she conducted research at the University of Pittsburgh’s Jean Monnet European Union Centre of Excellence in 2012. She obtained her B.A. degree in International Relations from Dokuz Eylül University, and her M.A. in European Studies from Ankara University. She had also several experiences for over 10 years working with an independent think-tank and, with a foundation for migration research. She is mainly interested in EU external migration policies, migration in rural areas, readmission, racism and xenophobia, Islamophobia and Turkey-EU relations.
Serkis Cengiz Kurumlu
Serkis is a native Turkish independent filming and digital communication professional with over 20 years career experience in multimedia, entertainment and production environments as producer, director, videographer/cameraman, film/video editor, creative director and content creator. Through his career, -as a creative visual content production proffesional, he diversed his interests at various stages of productions; whose later-on works has taken him around different motion visual platforms, including award winning documentary and feature films and produced/co- produced, directed/co-directed, shot, edited in more than 200 film and video projects both as free- lance basis and through his production company. Serkis continues to work on a diverse range of projects in digital media and cooperate communication areas, creating beautifully crafted content pieces, finding joy in his work making beautiful images to tell great stories. Serkis is Digital Communication & Dissemination Expert for the GAPs Project at the moment, as well.
Meltem Akoğlu
Meltem is a Communication Specialist for the GAPs Project. She is currently an International Relations & Media and Visual Arts student at Koç University in Istanbul. She previously worked at Mirekoç (Koc University Migration Research Center) as an undergraduate research assistant for the research about young refugees & asylum seekers in Turkey and their future expectations. In 2022, she worked as an undergraduate researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin on the Social Inequality in Turkey and India project. She has been working in the field through the project called Let’s Be United organized by the Koc University Global Aid community as a content coordinator. She spent one semester at Lund University in Sweden as an Erasmus student, and one semester at York University in Toronto as an exchange student. Meltem has interdisciplinary research interests in migration, diaspora studies, climate refugees, and the effect of gender on the migration process.
Recent Blog Entries
Israel’s recent escalation in Lebanon, including the reported assassination of top Hezbollah leaders such as Hassan Nasrallah, is not just another chapter in the region’s long history of conflict—it is a direct attack on the very fabric of Lebanese sovereignty and a further destabilization of an already fragile region. The assassination signals Israel's ongoing tactic of dismantling political movements that resist its occupation and expansionist policies, disregarding…