Dr. Özge Bilgili PhD, MSc.


Affiliated researcher

Research group(s):
6. Migration and Development

Özge Bilgili is currently an assistant professor at Utrecht University and Thomas J. Alexander fellow at the Education and Skills Department of the OECD. Her expertise is on immigrant integration, transnationalism and education research and policy analysis in relevant areas. She is the chair of Dutch Association for Migration Research (DAMR), the co-coordinator of IMISCOE Standing Committee on Interactions of Migrant Integration and Transnationalism in Europe (IMITE) and an affiliated researcher of United Nations University MERIT. As a migration scholar, she regularly does research for international organisations (IOM, UNHCR, MPI, MPG, and SDC) and country governments, lectures graduate students in her areas of expertise, and travels extensively around the world to present research findings to practitioners, policy makers and academics.

During her appointment at UNU-Merit, Dr. Özge Bilgili was a post-doctoral researcher on transnationalism (funded by MACIMIDE) and the theme leader of Integration, Social Cohesion and Transnationalism research. Her  research focused on integration and transnationalism debates in the EU context as well as economic remittances, diaspora engagement and return migration in the non-EU migrant sending countries. She has also worked as an evaluation researcher at United Nations University - MERIT & Maastricht Graduate School of Governance for the MIPEX 2015: Integration Policies, Who Benefits? Project in partnership with Migration Policy Group and Center for International Affairs Barcelona. She coordinated the evaluation research and wrote extensively on impact evaluation studies on integration policy outcomes in 7 policy dimensions, in 18 migrant receiving countries. She also worked as a migration and integration policy expert for the INTERACT Project (MPI and EUI) (2014) where she worked on the role of subanational authorities and international city-to-city partnerships on immigrant integration. She is competent in both qualitative and quantitative research skills, and has extensive research experience in European Member states, as well as other countries such as Turkey, Morocco, Rwanda and Benin.

Previously, she was a PhD research fellow at the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, Maastricht University where she worked for the Migration and Development: A World in Motion Project financed by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (IS Academy) focusing on the situation of immigrants in the Netherlands. Her dissertation entitled  "Simultaneity in transnational migration research: Links between migrants' host and home country orientation" has been published for the MGSoG Dissertation Series by Boekenplan. Earlier, she received a Bachelor's of Arts degree in Sociology from Galatasaray University, Istanbul as the top ranked student in 2007. In 2009, she acquired a Master of Science degree from the Migration, Ethnic Relations and Multiculturalism Prestige Research Master Program at Utrecht University where she studied with an Utrecht Excellence Scholarship, and worked as a research assistant. 




Selected publications by Özge Bilgili


UNU-MERIT