22/04/2025
Organized annually by the Research Planning and Policy Development Office under the Vice President’s Office for Research, the Research Info Day meeting was held on April 16, 2025, to share scientific research studies conducted at Sabancı University and to explain expectations regarding future goals in this field.
The opening speech of Research Info Day was made by Sabancı University President Yusuf Leblebici. In his speech, Yusuf Leblebici said, “We are truly proud to be a leading research university today, on this path that we started seven years ago with the aim of becoming a research university recognized worldwide. We are gaining serious momentum not only in our country but also throughout Europe.
Yusuf Leblebici stated that, according to the Times Higher Education, which measures more than two thousand universities worldwide, Sabancı University is ahead of many European universities in terms of research quality. He concluded his speech by saying, “I want to thank you all for making this happen. We will continue to take steps to provide better opportunities for you to continue your research. WE are not done yet, this is just the beginning. As you know, it does not happen in a year or two. It takes a long time.”
Within the scope of the event, Vice President for Research Mehmet Yıldız shared the critical developments in the global and national research ecosystem and then shared the University's research performance over ten-year analyses. Our Vice President, who shared the studies carried out and the mechanisms implemented to ensure the most effective research activities at the University by focusing on current developments in the past year, devoted a significant part of his presentation to strategic objectives and action plans for the next five-year period.
Mehmet Yıldız, who stated that our intensive application experiences in recent years, especially in projects supported by European Union funds, have now begun to bear fruit, said that our university is the top performer in the country in terms of the amount of funds received per faculty member from both EU funds and TÜBİTAK projects. Mehmet Yıldız, who stated that we have set quality-oriented targets for higher quality publications and that we have shown rapid development in terms of FWCI (Field-Weighted Citation Impact) in this sense in recent years, emphasized that this is critical for our university's recognition in the international arena and that it has also positively affected our position in the THE university rankings.
Mehmet Yıldız, who stated that approximately 120 million dollars of research budget was provided to our university through external sources in the last ten years and that these resources were also spent on research activities, emphasized that significant progress has been made in terms of productivity by increasing the number of publications from 2.1 to 3 per person. After sharing the steps taken to increase the quality and quantity of graduate students, who are an important element of our research human resources, he drew attention to the need to further increase applications to TÜBİTAK projects, which are of critical importance due to scholarship support. Mehmet Yıldız pointed out that our goals will be increased even more in the coming years so that there will be at least one active project per project manager. He added that actions are planned to recruit academics with high-quality and effective research outputs or very strong output potential, increase the number of research support personnel (researchers and postdoctoral researchers), increase the interaction between faculties and research centers, and transform the research communication structure. He concluded his presentation by emphasizing that maintaining our leading position is a much more challenging goal than rising to this position.
The event, which attracted great interest from academic and administrative staff, ended with a question-and-answer session where the President, Vice President, and Deans gave their comments based on the comments and questions of the participants
