Institute Directors

Prof. H. Fatih Uğurdağ, a former veteran of Silicon Valley, received his PhD in 1995 in the USA from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Electrical Engineering & Applied Physics. He received a BS in Electrical & Electronics Engineering (EEE) as well as a BS in Physics from Boğaziçi University in 1986. He went to CWRU as a teaching assistant and did an MS thesis on machine vision (finished in 1989) and a PhD dissertation on computer architecture and chip design automation. He worked in the industry in the USA between 1989-2004 at companies such as GE, GM, Lucent, Juniper, and Nvidia as a full-time machine vision engineer, EDA software developer, and chip designer. He was a consultant at Vestel Vestek Pixellence R&D group between 2007-2017. He has been the Chair of IEEE Türkiye Section since 2020, a professional organization with 400,000 members worldwide and 2,000 in Türkiye. Dr. Uğurdağ has been working at Özyeğin University EEE Dept. since 2010. As of March 2022, he took up the positions of Faculty of Engineering, Dean and Director Graduate School of Science. His research interests span the areas of ASIC/SoC/FPGA design, real-time embedded systems, machine vision, electric vehicles, and high frequency trading.

Atakan Yalçın serves as the Ozyegin University Business School Dean since June 2019. Before joining Özyeğin University Business Faculty in 2012 he was with Koc University, and has held visiting positions at Brandeis University and Boston College. Dr. Yalçın received his MBA from Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Finance from Carroll School of Management at Boston College in 2002. Dr. Yalçın has taught courses in Investment Management, Derivatives Securities and Financial Management. His research interest is in empirical asset pricing and empirical aspects of financial economics. His work has been published in such journals as the Journal of Empirical Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Financial Research, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Research. Dr. Yalçın is a member of the American Finance Association, Western Finance Association, Financial Management Association and the CFA Institute.

Dr. Gözkan received his B.A. degree in Philosophy from Boğaziçi University in 1994. She obtained her first master’s degree in philosophy at Boğaziçi University and her second master's degree in developmental psychology at Koç University, Department of Psychology. She completed her PhD in developmental psychology at Clark University in 2012. Dr. Gözkan's research focuses on social and emotional development during adolescence from the perspective of positive youth development and self-determination theory. Dr. Gözkan has been working in the Department of Psychology at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Özyeğin University since 2012. She served as the Head of the Department of Psychology between 2017-2020. Since September 2023, he has been working as the Director of the Institute of Social Sciences.