Since September 2022, İrem has been working as an Education & Research Officer at UNU-MERIT. As a part of her role, she is a member of the event management team where she coordinates the organization of events for staff and students like the Master Open Days, NASPAA competition and seminars. She also works with the MPP team where she provides insights from her experience as a recent graduate and former president of MPP study association, DEMOS, while learning more about education management. Passionate about teaching, Irem also has tutored Introduction to Data Science and STATA in the Fall semester and continues to tutor with the Capacity Development Office (CDO) for Public Policy Analysis and Process courses. As an advocate for youth participation in societal issues, Irem is an active alumni of the European Youth Parliament (EYP), where she has undertaken several roles in organizing, academic leadership and national governance. At the moment, she is leading the organizing team of the biggest capacity building event of EYP which will be hosted in Maastricht this summer with UNU-MERIT being the venue sponsor. 

Educational Background

İrem joined UNU-MERIT, right after graduating from the Master of Science in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP), a dual-degree program offered in collaboration with United Nations University and Maastricht University. During MPP, Irem merged her interest in innovation and development economics in the Free Elective track following some courses in Governance of Innovation and Foreign Policy & Development. 

Benefiting from the flexible structure, Irem also attended a variety of courses during her Bachelor studies building on her interdisciplinary understanding of societal problems and while doing so, discovered her interest in gender equality, development and labor supply. She explored her interests further in her Bachelor Thesis with a quantitative analysis on how governmental policies can increase the female labor force participation rate in middle income countries and successfully graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from University College Utrecht. 

She pursued her research interests in her graduate thesis as well, which focused on whether female workers in developing countries were at more risk with regards to automation than male workers. In this quantitative analysis, she created a vulnerability index based on the World Bank’s STEP Skills Measurement Survey which translated the tasks a job requires into the likelihood of the job getting automated in the future based on certain characteristics. She hopes to continue developing her research skills and aspires to contribute to the existing literature with a gender lens.