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. 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’m broadly interested in the relationship between organized violence and political order, particularly civil wars, insurgencies, state-building, contentious politics, and political regimes. My dissertation explores how state institutions transform during civil wars. 

Methodologically, I focus on set-theory, case selection and casing, theory development, causal mechanisms, multi-method research design, and the uses and misuses of statistics in the social sciences. I also work on conflict and protest event analysis, conceptualization and operationalization, and data reliability in violent and authoritarian contexts.

My academic work has been published in the Harvard Misinformation Review, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Journal of Global Security Studies, and Review of International Studies. I was awarded the 2025 Best Article Award in Kurdish Studies and an Honorable Mention for the 2024 Kendra Koivu Paper Award from APSA’s Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section.

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, as well as by The Scientific and Technological Research Institution of Turkey (TÜBİTAK).

I have experience creating and coding large-scale datasets, developing codebooks and coding protocols, and training and managing teams of undergraduate research assistants, experiences that have significantly shaped how I think about methodology in the social sciences.

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.