Director

Mehmet Fatih Aysan is a Professor of Sociology at Marmara University and the director of the Center for Population and Social Policies, Institute of Population and Social Research. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario (2011) and taught sociology at the same university (2010-2012). He previously worked as a faculty member in the Department of Sociology (2012-2020) and as the director of the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences (2016-2020) at İstanbul Şehir University. His sociological interests are rooted at the intersection of demography, family, sociology of work, and social policy. His study centers on how changes in demographics, labor markets, and social policies combine to influence the welfare of societies. His research projects were supported by the TÜBA, EU, ERC, IDRC, and TÜBİTAK. Dr. Aysan’s works are published in edited books and peer-reviewed journals such as Routledge, Palgrave, Springer, Population & Development Review, The Canadian Journal of Sociology, and Emerging Markets & Finance.

https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/maysan

Assistant Director

Zübeyir Nişancı teaches at the Department of Sociology at Marmara University. He received his undergraduate degree from Boğaziçi University and completed his master’s degree at Hartford Seminary. During his studies, he worked as a data analyst at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. He received Ph.D. from Loyola University Chicago where he also taught various courses as a lecturer. Between 2011 and 2013, Zübeyir Nişancı worked as a statistics adviser at Loyola. He also worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at İstanbul Şehir University between 2015 and 2019. His areas of interest include quantitative methods, sociology of religion, youth studies, religious movements, civic participation, social inequalities, immigration, and globalization.

https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/8494

Assistant Director

Muhammet Tahir Kılavuz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Marmara University. His research interests include authoritarianism, regime change, religion and politics, coup d’état, and survey analysis, both in the MENA and in the cross-regional setting. More specifically, he examines the durability of authoritarian regimes and their transitions both to other types of dictatorship and to democracy, with a particular emphasis on how institutions shape and constrain the behavior of political regimes and the masses. He received his master’s degree from Koç University and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2019. He also served as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Belfer Center's Middle East Initiative at Harvard University.

https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/mkilavuz

Member

Ayşe Yetiş-Bayraktar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Marmara University. She is also a board member of the Center for Population and Social Policy. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2013 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology at Boğaziçi University between 2013 and 2015. She was a faculty member at the Department of Sociology at Altınbaş University between 2016 and 2020, where she served as the Associate Dean for the School of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences between 2019 and 2020. Her areas of interest are social stratification, sociology of work, and sociology of time use. Published in 2013 in Work and Occupations, her article entitled "From the Shop Floor to the Kitchen Floor: Maternal Occupational Complexity and Children's Reading and Math Skills" was a finalist for the prestigious Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award in 2014.

https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/ayse.yetis

Member

Aslıhan Nişancı is an Associate Professor at Marmara University. She obtained her undergraduate and MA degrees from Boğaziçi University and completed her master's studies in social work at Jane Addams College of Social Work, where her area of concentration was mental health. As part of her studies, she worked in several social work organizations in the United States. During her Ph.D. studies at Jane Addams College of Social Work, her dissertation research focused on the relationship between parenting and adolescent well-being in Turkish immigrant families in the United States. She worked as an Assistant Professor of Social Work at İstanbul 29 Mayıs University and Nottingham Trent University. Her practice and research interests include mental health, parenting, child well-being, and immigration. She has completed several mental health trainings and has experience in counseling practice. Additionally, she is a registered social worker in England and a member of the British Association of Social Workers.

https://avesis.marmara.edu.tr/14558