I am associate professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cankaya University. In 2012, I took my doctoral degree at the Department of City and Regional Planning at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. My Ph.D. thesis is about the post-disaster recovery process and location choices of businesses. My thesis was funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, and I was granted as PhD fellow by the same Council. I have published articles at high-ranked international journals. In addition to teaching at undergraduate and graduate degree programs, I have conducted projects funded by public and private agencies. Most recently, I worked as consultant in the United Nations Development Programme’s national project on business continuity in face of earthquake risks.
Studying the spatial impacts of disasters on business behavior in Turkish case which has a high vulnerable characteristic to a variety of natural hazards, I realized that communities need additional attention to be prepared with all components to survive following a stressor. In addition to built-up environment and physical resistance of the community systems, businesses will be a key component in developing a resilience perspective at aggregate level.
I work on the business environment and their vulnerability to stressors by analyzing their adoption mechanisms against business discontinuity to avoid urban decline. Regarding the context-dependent operations, susceptibility and recovery of business environment, I seek to enhance an integrated and holistic approach for the adaptive capacity of urban systems together with the expertise provided by 4TU Centre for Resilience. Under the 4TU.RE fellowship program, my aim is to construct collaboration on resilience thinking with respect to business recovery paths, dependencies and solutions that could be a guide for policy-making, and a base for a further crisis.