Director

Professor Mehmet Fatih Aysan

Mehmet Fatih Aysan is a Professor of Sociology at Marmara University and the director of the Center for Population and Social Policies, Institute of Population and Social Research. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario (2011) and taught sociology at the same university (2010-2012). He previously worked as a faculty member in the Department of Sociology (2012-2020) and as the director of the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences (2016-2020) at İstanbul Şehir University. His sociological interests are rooted at the intersection of demography, family, sociology of work, and social policy. His study centers on how changes in demographics, labor markets, and social policies combine to influence the welfare of societies. His research projects were supported by the TÜBA, EU, ERC, IDRC, and TÜBİTAK. Dr. Aysan’s works are published in edited books and peer-reviewed journals such as Routledge, Palgrave, Springer, Population & Development Review, The Canadian Journal of Sociology, and Emerging Markets & Finance.

https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/maysan

Assistant Director

Associate Professor Asil Özdoğru

Asil Özdoğru completed his undergraduate education in the double major program between Guidance and Psychological Counseling and Psychology at Boğaziçi University in 2003. He received his master's and doctoral degrees in educational psychology from State University of New York at Albany. Between 2003 and 2012, he worked as a research assistant, instructor, and associate in various institutions and organizations in the United States. Between 2012 and 2023, he worked as a faculty member at Üsküdar University and served as the head of Department of Psychology (English) and as vice dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He currently works as a faculty member at the Department of Psychology at Marmara University and serves as the head of Division of Developmental Psychology and the assistant director of the Institute of Population and Social Research. His academic interests include child development, adult learning, applied psychology, and team science.

https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/15236

Assistant Professor Zeynep Selen Artan 

Head Of The Department Of Demography

Selen Artan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Marmara University. She holds a PhD. in sociology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her scholarly interests span across migration, identity, gender, media, and culture. Her research has been published in academic journals such as Political Geography and Toplum ve Bilim as well as several edited volumes.

Assistant Professor Mehmet Fuat Kına  

Head of Social Research Department

I am an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at Marmara University, where my expertise centers on computational social sciences, causal inference, social movements, and comparative welfare analysis. I also serve as a lecturer for advanced data analysis methods in the Computational Social Sciences MA program at Koç University, where I'm actively involved with the Politus Project and the Center for Computational Social Sciences (CSS). My current research primarily focuses on measuring public opinion using digital traces, linking diverse data sources such as surveys, social media, and administrative records, and finally quantitative determinants of labor movement mobilization in Turkey. I hold a Bachelor of Economics from Boğaziçi University, a Master’s degree from İstanbul Şehir University, and a PhD from Koç University's Sociology program. For my doctoral dissertation, I explored the interplay between radical rural movements and welfare policies in Brazil and India. This investigation proposed an analytical framework to understand how the governments of Brazil and India leverage social assistance programs to demobilize radical rural movements, and how this strategy is reversed in India, while successfully containing the Brazilian rural poor. To tackle case-specific reverse causality issues, I employed quasi-experimental methodologies in both contexts.

Professor Mehmet Babacan

Mehmet Babacan is a Professor of Economics at Marmara University. He completed his undergraduate education in the English Economics program at Marmara University in 2003. He received his master’s degree at Clemson University’s John E. Walker Department of Economics in 2007, and received his Ph.D. in the English Economics program at Marmara University in 2011. Prof. Dr. Babacan began his academic career as a Research Assistant at Clemson University in the United States. After returning to Türkiye, he worked as a Research Assistant, Lecturer, Department Chair, and Centre Director at Istanbul Commerce University between 2008 and 2014. Prof. Dr. Babacan, who has also worked as a Researcher at SETA-Istanbul Economics Department, currently works as a member of the Supervisory Board of the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye. He has numerous publications, projects, research papers, and conference presentations in various fields, primarily focusing on international trade and governance, economic growth, and political economy.

Professor Nurullah Gür

Nurullah Gür is a Professor of Economics at Marmara University. He completed his undergraduate education in 2006 and his master's degree in 2008 in the English Economics program at Marmara University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Essex Department of Economics in 2012. His primary research areas include economic development, the finance-real sector relationship, and international political economy. In recent years, he has focused on the political economy of industrial and technology policies. Prof. Dr. Gür has publications in numerous national and international academic journals. He co-authored the book “Rethinking Industry: Reflections of Global Technological Transformation on World and Turkish Economy” with Prof. Dr. Sadık Ünay and Dr. Şerif Dilek, which examines the impacts of global technological transformation on industry. His article, “US–China Economic Rivalry and the Reshoring of Global Supply Chains,” delves into the origins and consequences of the technology war between the US and China and was published in the prestigious journal, The Chinese Journal of International Politics.

Associate Professor Muhammet Tahir Kılavuz

Muhammet Tahir Kılavuzis an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Marmara University. His research interests include authoritarianism, regime change, religion and politics, coup d’état, and survey analysis, both in the MENA and in the cross-regional setting. More specifically, he examines the durability of authoritarian regimes and their transitions both to other types of dictatorship and to democracy, with a particular emphasis on how institutions shape and constrain the behavior of political regimes and the masses. He received his master’s degree from Koç University and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2019. He also served as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Belfer Center's Middle East Initiative at Harvard University.

https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/mkilavuz

Associate Professor Aslıhan Nişancı

Aslıhan Nişancı is an Associate Professor at Marmara University. She obtained her undergraduate and MA degrees from Boğaziçi University and completed her master's studies in social work at Jane Addams College of Social Work, where her area of concentration was mental health. As part of her studies, she worked in several social work organizations in the United States. During her Ph.D. studies at Jane Addams College of Social Work, her dissertation research focused on the relationship between parenting and adolescent well-being in Turkish immigrant families in the United States. She worked as an Assistant Professor of Social Work at İstanbul 29 Mayıs University and Nottingham Trent University. Her practice and research interests include mental health, parenting, child well-being, and immigration. She has completed several mental health trainings and has experience in counseling practice. Additionally, she is a registered social worker in England and a member of the British Association of Social Workers.

https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/14558

Assistant Professor  Zübeyir Nişancı

Zübeyir Nişancı teaches at the Department of Sociology at Marmara University. He received his undergraduate degree from Boğaziçi University and completed his master’s degree at Hartford Seminary. During his studies, he worked as a data analyst at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. He received Ph.D. from Loyola University Chicago where he also taught various courses as a lecturer. Between 2011 and 2013, Zübeyir Nişancı worked as a statistics adviser at Loyola. He also worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at İstanbul Şehir University between 2015 and 2019. His areas of interest include quantitative methods, sociology of religion, youth studies, religious movements, civic participation, social inequalities, immigration, and globalization.

https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/8494

Assistant Professor Ayşe Yetiş-Bayraktar 

Ayşe Yetiş-Bayraktar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Marmara University. She is also a board member of the Center for Population and Social Policy. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2013 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology at Boğaziçi University between 2013 and 2015. She was a faculty member at the Department of Sociology at Altınbaş University between 2016 and 2020, where she served as the Associate Dean for the School of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences between 2019 and 2020. Her areas of interest are social stratification, sociology of work, and sociology of time use. Published in 2013 in Work and Occupations, her article entitled "From the Shop Floor to the Kitchen Floor: Maternal Occupational Complexity and Children's Reading and Math Skills" was a finalist for the prestigious Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award in 2014.

https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/ayse.yetis