3 BS Alumni

Asya (IE) completed her bachelor’s degree with a double major in Industrial Engineering and International Business Administration and Trade at Ozyegin University. During her time at Ozyegin, she excelled academically while actively involved in various extracurricular activities. She served as a Teaching Assistant for several courses and actively participated in the TUSIAD Sustainability Development Forum. She started being involved in research projects and publications. Furthermore, she took on leadership roles as a board member and president of the Outdoor Sports Club, fostering a sense of community and promoting an active lifestyle among her peers. She is also an alumni of the Turkish Entrepreneurship Foundation.

Continuing her education, Asya pursued a master’s in Operations Research at North Carolina State University. During her time at NC State, she took on leadership roles within the Turkish Students Association, serving as vice president and president. Her academic contributions and dedication were recognized through various awards, including the College of Engineering Graduate Merit Award 2019, the University Graduate Fellowship 2019, and the ISE Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award 2023.

Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Transportation Systems, Civil Engineering at NC State, with an anticipated graduation in August 2023. Her research areas include Sustainable Transportation Systems, Humanitarian Logistics, Network Optimization, and Data Analytics. Her Ph.D. thesis focuses on traffic incident response network design, routing optimization, and incident hot-spot prediction. Starting in the fall of 2023, Asya has been offered a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Business Analytics at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

Gözde (IE) is a Data Scientist at Rabobank, which is one of the largest banks in the Netherlands, operating in 38 countries around the world. She works on projects to generate AI solutions to better serve the corporate and the private clients while increasing profitability of the bank.

When she was a junior at Ozyegin University, she had an internship focused on branch workforce optimization in San Diego, California where she had the opportunity to apply her academic knowledge to real case. In her senior year, she continued taking selective courses in the field of data science and graduated from Ozyegin University in 2015 as the valedictorian of her class.

After spending two years as a data scientist in finance sector, she pursued a master's degree in Business Analytics and Operations Research from Tilburg University. She then joined Nielsen, where she improved the marketing budget optimization software and implemented it for various firms in countries such as Brazil, Japan, Canada. Since 2020, she have been working at Rabobank on projects such as identifying the best next product for corporate clients or predicting customer churn, where she employs various machine learning algorithms.

In addition to developing the models, she ensures their implementation in a scalable manner to be used in business decisions. Alongside her projects, she supports other data scientists who would like to improve their coding skills by preparing training sessions and workshops.

Ece Nur Balık (IE) works as a Business and Data Analyst at KoçZer, one of the Koç Group Companies. Ece Nur completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Özyeğin University Department of Industrial Engineering with a high honor degree. She worked voluntarily for Kahve Dünyası and Fiba Commercial Properties companies with the non-credit summer internship programs offered by our university, during her undergraduate education. She was selected for the international internship program organized by our university for successful students and had the opportunity to see business life in a different culture at Anchor Group in Romania. Ece Nur completed her internships which gave her a variety of professional perspectives, at Adel Kalemcilik and DHL Supply Chain companies on creating value and ensuring efficiency in business processes in supply chain.

Ece Nur, who studied in Finland for 4 months with the Erasmus Student Exchange Program, being one of the students representing our university in the Joost Peters Student Business Challenge held in the Netherlands the next year, developed projects with students from different cultures during her undergraduate period.

In the master's program which she started after her undergraduate education, she worked on the "Open-End Bin Packing Problem with Conflicts", a new topic in the combinatorial optimization literature and adapted various algorithms to this problem, developed a metaheuristic algorithm that would perform better than these algorithms under the leadership of her thesis advisor Prof. Dr. Ali Ekici. She presented her work at the ISCO2022 (International Symposium on Combinatorial Optimization) conference.