Welcome! I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, where I’m also pursuing a Master’s degree in Applied Statistics, and a predoctoral researcher with the ERC-funded COUNSTER project at Bilkent University. I work primarily on political violence and social science methodology. Before Northwestern, I got my BA and MA degrees in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. 

I am currently writing my dissertation, which examines the origins and dynamics of civil wars. You can read more about my dissertation and other ongoing projects on my research page.

My academic work has been published in the Journal of Peace Research, Review of International Studies, Journal of Global Security Studies, Harvard Misinformation Review, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Birikim. I was awarded the 2024 Best Article Award in Kurdish Studies by the Kurdish Political Studies Program at the University of Central Florida, an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Kendra Koivu Paper Award from APSA’s Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section, and was shortlisted for the 2026 Cedric Smith Prize awarded by the Conflict Research Society. 

I am broadly interested in the relationship between organized violence and political order, with particular interests in civil wars and insurgencies, state-building, contentious politics and social movements, and political regimes. Methodologically, my interests center on theory development, causal explanation, and research design, particularly set-theoretic approaches, case selection and casing, and multi-method research. I am also interested in the uses and misuses of quantitative methods in the social sciences, especially questions of conceptualization, measurement, and data reliability in the study of political violence and authoritarian regimes.

I especially enjoy thinking about thinking: how people theorize and make sense of the world, the implicit logics embedded in their arguments, and the tools we can use to think more creatively and systematically about causation and explanation. I also often grapple with whether the underlying structure of the world is probabilistic or set-theoretic, and how best to model social phenomena accordingly.

My research has been supported by Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute, Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program, Middle East and North African Studies Program, and Department of Political Science, the Scientific and Technological Research Institution of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), and the Institute for Humane Studies.