The METU Prof. Dr. Mustafa N. Parlar Education and Research Foundation 2020 Awards have been announced. Sabancı University is the institution with the highest number of awards this year, as it was last year, with a total of 6 awards, one for "Science" and five for "Research Incentives". 

Sabancı University School of Management (YBF) academic staff member Arzu Wasti received the Mustafa Parlar Foundation Science Award, which is given to scientists who have contributed significantly to science at the international level with their scientific studies and research or who have contributed significantly to the development of the country with their scientific findings.

Sabancı University Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences (FENS) Faculty Member, Burak Kocuk, Arts and Social Sciences Faculty (FASS) Faculty Member, Cenk Özbay, FENS Faculty Member, Kağan Kurşungöz, FASS Faculty Member, Mustafa Oğuz Afacan and FASS Faculty Member, Nüfer Yasin Ateş, have received the Mustafa Parlar Foundation Research Incentive Award, which is given to young researchers under the age of 40 who have contributed to the development of one of the fields of science or helped solve problems in the country related to their field. 

We congratulate our faculty on their important achievements!

The theme for the 2021 edition of the annual Sakıp Sabancı International Research Awards given by Sabancı University is "Post-Corona World And Turkey: Social Psychological And Political Impacts Of The Pandemics.” The deadline for submissions is February 5, 2021.

The Sakıp Sabancı International Research Awards involves a Jury Prize that will be awarded to an individual who has made distinguished contributions on the above-mentioned theme.

In addition to the Jury Prize, Essay Awards will be given to three researchers under 45 years of age. An independent and international jury will select the Essay Award and Jury Prize awardees. 

The deadline for submissions is February 5, 2021

Award Theme

In coping with Covid-19 pandemic, government policies in the world displayed considerable differences. While some governments implemented social distancing through emergency laws, others approached this as a matter of personal choice and ventured into persuading their citizens towards self-confinement, with mixed success. In the fight against the pandemic, the success of the government policies became increasingly dependent on the behavior of their citizens. Civic activism was curtailed along with the decline in the citizens’ ability to come together, organize and advocate. Nevertheless, new civil society actors and a novel type of civic activism emerged in attempts to provide essential services such as food and masks, stop the spread of incorrect and harmful information as well as protect the disadvantaged and marginalized groups.

What were the social psychological factors in understanding the impact of perceived threat of spreading Covid-19? Did the pandemic increase potentially maladaptive collective defensive behaviors, such as stigmatization, xenophobia, social isolation, fear of job loss, distrust toward health system and governments, as well as adaptive social behaviors, such as, social cohesion, creative collective actions, and altruism?

What were the factors behind the adoption of such different government policies and citizen behavior in the face of the pandemic? Did the pandemic trigger novel government policies and citizen behavior or rather lend more credence to the already existing tendencies and status quo? What were the impacts of societal underpinnings such as the prevalence of individual and/or collective life styles in different societies in addressing the pandemic? Can individual autonomy coexist alongside the collective needs of the societies facing the pandemic? How did the government and citizens in Turkey respond to the pandemic and how do these responses compare with their counterparts in other countries?  Can responses to the pandemic enable us to cope better with other impending threats such as climate change?

Sabancı University Faculty of Engineering an Natural Sciences member and SUNUM researcher Ali Kosar was appointed as the Subject Editor in the Elsevier journal Applied Thermal Engineering for a 3 year period.    

Ali Kosar will handle peer-review processes of the submitted manuscripts about specific topics.

Applied Thermal Engineering

The journal Applied Thermal Engineering is one of the most prestigious journals in the field of Thermal Sciences and has a CiteScore of 8.8.  It lies within Top 10% of the journals in the categories of Energy Engineering and Power Technology (18/216) and Industrial and Manufacturing Technology (15/340).

Sabancı University Integrated Manufacturing Research and Application Center (SU-IMC) Integrated Manufacturing Webinar Series continues with Spilios Fassois's "Vibration Based Robust Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) Under Varying Operating Conditions & Uncertainty: Principles & Advances" seminar.

Please click to register webinar. 

Sabancı University Integrated Manufacturing Research and Application Center (SU-IMC) organizes series of thematic seminars/webinars at different levels of academia and industry to understand and prioritize the recent institutional, organizational and technical developments for the Composite Structures. 

SU-IMC Thematic Webinar Series program

Our Arts and Social Sciences Faculty Member Abdurrahman Aydemir’s article titled “Skill-based immigration, economic integration, and economic performance” is listed among today’s featured article for the IZA World of Labor.  

Please click to read the article.  

Sabancı University Faculty of Engineering an Natural Sciences member Yasemin Şengül Tezel will serve as the editor in the Elsevier journal “Applications in Engineering Science”. 

Applications in Engineering Science, which is an Elsevier journal, accepts a broad spectrum of contributions in engineering sciences and its applied aspects while its core interest lies in material modelling and response.

The journal where Şengül Tezel joins the editorial board of the journal consisting of world-known mathematicians and engineers especially encourages interdisciplinary studies.

As a result of her doctorate studies at the University of Oxford and research areas she has been interested in afterwards, Şengül Tezel has many contributions in the subjects within the scope of the journal including modelling and mathematical analysis of viscoelastic materials. Her review articles on nonlinear viscoelasticity of strain-rate type and strain-limiting viscoelasticity, which has been published in high-ranked journals recently, allowed her to become a leading expert on such fields.

Applications in Engineering Science Journal

For further information about the Applications in Engineering Science Journal please click.

"Workshop on the technological advancements in cement additives for renewable and sustainable thermal energy storage" will be held between 9:30 and 12:30 on January 12, 2021 and hosted by Sabancı University and under the chairmanship of SU IMC Researcher Burcu Saner Okan.

In the workshop, the outputs of the GEOCOND project (https://geocond-project.eu) carried out within the scope of Horizon 2020, where Saner Okan is a principal investigator from Turkey’s side and the faculty member of Yusuf Menceloglu is a researcher, will be presented. 

In the workshop program, the project partners from Çimsa and Carmel Olefins (Israel) will make presentations and Pınar Mengüç from Ozyegin University, Director of Centre for Energy, Environment and Economy, will be an invited speaker with his talk entitled as “Energy Efficiency as a Transdisciplinary Concept: Research and Applications”. 

Please click for the workshop program and to register.

The Purple Certificate Program, which has been conducted within SU Gender for 13 years, was held online for the first time this year.A total of 57 teachers and faculty of education students from 28 different cities participated in the training held between 17-22 August 2020.

Organizing one-week training programs spread over a year with the purpose of disseminating awareness related to gender equality in formal education, preparing supportive curriculum materials sensitive to gender equality, and carrying out dissemination activities by visiting cities in different regions of Turkey, the Purple Certificate Program is currently performing many of its activities online due to the pandemic conditions.

In this context, teachers and prospective teachers actively participated in the one-week online training program organized between 17-22 August 2020. In order to facilitate the participation in the program and reduce screen fatigue, various participant-centered and art-based activities were also carried out during the program. The most important advantage of organizing the program online was the significantly increase in the access of disabled participants and convenient participation in the program especially for people who have not previously applied for the program as they have home care obligations. Participants who had difficulties with access to the internet and a computer were offered financial support for access to these tools.

SU Gender's message:

“The issue of expanding access to both online and face-to-face studies, which became a more concrete agenda item during the pandemic period, will now be an indispensable part of the Purple Certificate Program’s agenda. We welcome all teachers to the online Purple Certificate on 16-20 November 2020. 

Want to meet the Purple Certificate Program?

Hülya Adak is the Director of SU Gender and an associate professor at Sabancı University's Doctoral Program in Cultural Studies and Gender Studies. Having completed her master's and doctoral studies in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, Hülya Adak develops the training programs of SU Gender and works on collaborations with with Sabancı University’s Executive Development Unit and international gender studies centers as well as online training. Adak, who also focuses on Sexual Harassment and Gender-based Violence during the COVID-19 period, organizes international webinars on these issues with researchers from SU Gender and works on joint publications, research, and action plans. Having won Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, British Academy (Newton), COST (Horizon 2020), and Marie Curie Supervisor awards in the fields of Gender and Women's Studies, Adak has been a professor at the Free University of Berlin since 2018. She also has many publications in the fields of literature, history, theater, memory studies, trauma studies, gender, and women's studies. For some of her publications, see: https://sabanciuniv.academia.edu/H%C3%BClyaAdak

Ceyda Karadaş received her bachelor's degree in International Relations from Ege University and her master's degree in Gender and Women's Studies from Middle East Technical University with her thesis on the Beauty Perceptions of Women Before and After Plastic Surgery. Since 2018, she has been the Purple Certificate Project Coordinator at Sabancı University Gender and Women's Studies Center of Excellence. Her interests include gender, education, and beauty perception. Ceyda Karadaş lives in Kadıköy with her two cats.

Born in Istanbul in 1991, Nazlı Hazar graduated from the Sociology Department of Bahçeşehir University in 2015 with her thesis entitled “Jewish Representations in 30’s and 40’s: The Case of Akbaba Magazine.” In 2016, she completed her second major in Political Science and International Relations at Bahçeşehir University. She finished her master’s studies at the Cultural Studies Department, Sabancı University in 2020 with her thesis entitled “Silent Memories: Yazidi Women in Turkey.” In 2019, she started working as a Purple Certificate Project Specialist at Sabancı University Gender and Women's Studies Center of Excellence. Her interests include gender, oral history, ethnography, memory, ethnicity, violence, and resistance.

İlayda Ece Ova

She completed her undergraduate studies at the Department of International Relations, Bilkent University. She completed her master's degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University with a dissertation on the cultural production of migration movements. She joined SU Gender in 2018 after her experience working in a non-governmental organization focusing on refugees. In addition to the Purple Certificate Program, she works on Curious Steps and GEARING-Roles projects.

Emirhan Deniz Çelebi

TÜSİAD - Sabancı University Competition Forum (REF) held the second of its conference series on the Turkish economy and sector policies. At the second conference of the series, company dynamics and new employment creation in Turkey were discussed. 

Bahadır Balkır, Vice Chairman of TÜSİAD Board of Directors and Chairman of Industrial Policies Round Table, delivered the opening speech of the conference.  

Discussing the topic of employment with its various dimensions together with the the Fourth Industrial Revolution and with its increasing economic and social significance in the Covid-19 period, Bahadır Balkır highlighted in his speech that they are aware of the growing interest in the employment dynamics in both developed and developing countries and the impact of employment dynamics on employment stands out as a quite remarkable topic in both the academic literature and in practice. 

After the opening speech, a panel was held where Prof. Dr. Ümit Özlale and Dr. Beyza Polat presented their work entitled “Understanding Company Dynamics and Employment Creation in Turkey " and Prof. Dr. Haluk Levent evaluated the effects of company dynamics on employment creation. 

It was stated in the panel moderated by Esra Durceylan Kaygusuz, the Director of TÜSİAD-Sabancı University Competitiveness Forum and a faculty member at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) that there are fundamental structural problems related to employment: high exit rate from workforce, skill mismatch, brain drain, and impact of early deindustrialization, employment capacity of the industry, and refugees on the labor market. It was noted that public support is scale-driven at companies and this needs to be reviewed. It was especially emphasized that newly established small-scale companies in Turkey create a large part of the employment, and that these companies fall down before they can grow as they age. The importance of conducting analysis in Turkey on a regional basis and the implementing different policies in each region was also highlighted. 

In addition, the panel evaluated the impact of the Covid-19 on the employment dynamics in our country, and emphasized that the labor problem has begun earlier than this period, and progressed even further.

You can watch the recording of the event below.