3 BS Alumni

Farzad completed his doctoral studies in Industrial Engineering at Özyeğin University, where he achieved academic success and actively participated in various research projects. His research thesis focused on optimization under uncertainty and was accompanied by simultaneous involvement in multiple research endeavors. He successfully defended his thesis in February 2023 and was distinguished as the outstanding researcher at the engineering faculty of Özyeğin University during the final year of his Ph.D. studies. He also collaborated with scholars from Binghamton University to solve the electric bus scheduling challenge of the university's shuttle network. Additionally, Farzad served as a teaching assistant for various courses, particularly for heuristic algorithms for optimization courses.

Currently, Farzad continues his post-doctoral studies at HEC Montréal, where he concentrates on tackling inventory routing and distribution problems for Hydro Quebec, Canada's largest power utility and a significant global hydropower provider. Simultaneously, he remains committed to advancing projects in transportation optimization and optimization under uncertainty, particularly emphasizing public transportation. Farzad actively engages as a member of esteemed research institutes in the logistics field, including Cirrelt and GERAD.

Berke Söylemezoğlu (IE) works as a brand manager at P&G. Giving great importance to the social activities provided by the university during his student period, Berke played in 5 theater plays with the OzU Chamber Theater in the first 3 years of his OzU adventure and participated in festivals. Then, he became the president of the OzU Operations Research Club, which he founded with his friends. The club has become the most active and crowded club in Özyeğin within 2 years.

Berke participated in volunteering programs in Lithuania for 2 months and Finland for 2 months during the summer periods as team leader. He had the chance to work with people from different countries and cultures. He also took part as a Peer Advisor in the Peer Advisor program, which Özyeğin University has set up for freshman students to get used to school. After graduation, he continued to share his experiences by recording podcasts and providing mentoring to university students.

Since Özyeğin University has adopted sectoral education as one of its main focuses, Berke had the opportunity to do a non-credit internships at Fiba Bank and GAP companies within the FIBA Group while he was a freshman. After that, he gained work experience at his internships at Philip Morris, Bayer and Coca Cola Beverage companies. As part of the graduation thesis course of the department of Industrial Engineering, he had the chance to work on a real problem that Unilever is experiencing and found a solution to the problem with the support of our academics.

In the Spring semester of 2020, Berke started as a Business Analyst at Deloitte Consulting company and then moved to P&G as Brand Manager, still continues to work in this position.

Naz (CS) worked in Microsoft as a trainee when she was a sophomore. During this tenure, she regularly contributed to young children in teaching computer programming and promotional activities. During her internship at Vodafone, she worked in Data Science R&D and Business Intelligence IT departments. She got 3 patents and she had the opportunity to be the "first author" in all these patents. In her last year, she was elected to represent Özyeğin University's Faculty of Engineering in the Müdek accreditation committee.

After graduating from Özyeğin University, she did her Master's in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Leuven in Belgium. She completed this advanced master's program as an honor student in 1 year. She worked as a data scientist at Amazon Netherlands for 4 years. In this process, she provided consultancy to many companies in the Fortune 400 list in the field of artificial intelligence. She took part in the project that added artificial intelligence to the races of Formula 1. Finally, she started to work in Google, Netherlands. She is currently working at Google as a Machine Learning Specialist Engineer.