Before political science, I studied economics at Bogazici University and Middle East studies at METU, where my master’s thesis used social network analysis to map Turkish Salafist communities on Twitter — my first encounter with the idea that network structure reveals political structure. That thread has run through everything since.
At Northeastern, I am a PhD candidate in Political Science with a minor in Computational Social Science, working with Nick Beauchamp in the Network Science Institute. My dissertation, Exposure Diversity and Character in Political Segregation Online, develops computational frameworks to measure how patterns of exposure in digital spaces relate to the formation of political attitudes and collective identities.
My broader research program operates across four interconnected clusters. In Segregation, I use LLM-based multilabel classification to measure the dimensional composition of anti-Americanism in 95,933 Turkish tweets across 13 years (with Zeynep Elif Koç and Tuba Unlu Bilgic), apply the same approach to anti-Western sentiment in political speech, and employ relational event models to analyze how epistemic elite networks among 1,933 Turkish and American foreign policy experts segregate along national lines. In Resilience, I study how different dimensions of social capital diverge in disaster recovery using a three-wave panel survey of Marshall Fire survivors, examine the engagement paradox in post-disaster governance, and conduct a Delphi-method survey of 92 crisis professionals on the contested concept of polycrisis. In Political Methodology, I develop theoretical expectations for how core network mechanisms — homophily, transitivity, preferential attachment — respond to exogenous shocks, and argue that LLM-based stance detection conflates distinct constructs, producing systematic validity gaps in political text annotation. In Anthropology of Machines, I use logit lens analysis and representational similarity measures to investigate political sycophancy in large language models, finding that models commit early to sycophantic responses with little internal deliberation.
My commitment to computational capacity-building runs parallel to my research. I co-founded the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) in Istanbul, organizing three annual cohorts of interdisciplinary graduate students, postdocs, and early-career faculty after graduating from SICSS Helsinki in 2018. I led the CS Bootcamp at Northeastern’s Ethics Institute, covering Python fundamentals through LLM fine-tuning for philosophy and CS graduate students. As Data Consultant at the Boston Area Research Initiative (Northeastern and Harvard), I provided one-on-one statistical consulting and data literacy training to community organizations, maintained data pipelines and ArcGIS maps, and mentored students from high school to master’s level. I have taught Computational Thinking and Civic Responsibility at Kadir Has University and served as teaching assistant for six courses in comparative politics, international relations, and security studies at Northeastern.
My research has been presented at PolMeth, PolNet, IC2S2, PaCSS, ISA, and NULab, and I have received travel grants from APSA’s PolMeth and PolCom sections and from NULab. I was awarded the Turkish Academy of Sciences GEBIP PhD Fellowship and a full ICPSR Summer Program Scholarship from the Russell Sage Foundation. I hold a Graduate Certificate in Computational Social Science from Northeastern and completed intensive methods training at the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan’s ICPSR program. I speak Turkish natively, English professionally, and have working knowledge of Arabic and elementary knowledge in French.
Education
- Northeastern University (Boston, MA) — PhD, Political Science (minor: Computational Social Science), 2021–2027 (expected Spring)
- Northeastern University (Boston, MA) — Graduate Certificate, Computational Social Science, 2021–2022
- University of Oxford — Spring Institute, Research Methodology & Quantitative Methods, April 2021
- Kadir Has University (Istanbul, Turkey) — PhD Coursework, International Relations, 2019–2021
- University of Michigan — ICPSR Summer Institute (full scholarship), Research Methodology & Quantitative Methods, Summer 2020
- Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) — M.Sc., Middle East Studies, 2016–2019
- Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey) — B.A., Economics, 2016
Research Experience
- CS Bootcamp Lead — The Ethics Institute, Northeastern University, May–July 2025
- Data Consultant — Boston Area Research Initiative (Northeastern & Harvard), May 2023–February 2025
- NULab/DITI Research Fellow — Northeastern University, Summer 2022
- WWP Research Fellow — Northeastern University, Summer 2022
- Researcher — Turkish Foreign Policy Barometer on Twitter (German Marshall Fund), 2020–2021
- Research Assistant — Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies (ORSAM, Ankara), 2016–2018
Publications
Working Papers
- Measuring Anti-Americanism with LLMs — Yunus Emre Tapan, Zeynep Elif Koç, Tuba Unlu Bilgic → Project page
Thesis
- Turkish Salafism on Twitter: Social Network Analysis — Master Thesis (unpublished), September 2019
Book Chapters
- Anti-communist Propaganda: The Example of Buyuk Dogu Journal — with O. Colak and E. Aksu, February 2016, Nobel Academic Publishing
Conferences & Talks
- PolMeth Conference — July 2024, Poster Presenter (Riverside, CA)
- PolNet Conference — June 2024, Poster Presenter (Tallahassee, FL)
- 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) — July 2022, Poster Presenter (University of Chicago)
- 5th Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) — June 2022, Paper Presenter (Harvard University)
- 6th International Conference on Computational Social Science — July 2020, Poster Presenter (MIT, Online)
- 3rd PaCSS Conference — August 2020, Poster Presenter (Northeastern University, Online)
Invited Talks
- Using the Twitter API for Academic Research — August 2022, Twitter (Boston)
Awards & Funding
Travel Grants
- APSA-PolCom Travel Grant — September 2024 (Philadelphia, PA)
- APSA-PolMeth Travel Grant — July 2024 (Riverside, CA)
- Northeastern University Political Science Dept. Travel Grant — June 2024
- NULab Travel Grant — June 2022 (Boston, MA)
Fellowships
- Stipended Graduate Assistantship (SGA) — September 2021–Present, Northeastern University
- Turkish Academy of Sciences-GEBIP PhD Fellowship — September 2019–2020, Full-year stipend
- ICPSR Summer Program Scholarship — July–August 2020 (Ann Arbor, MI)
- SICSS Fellowship — June 2018, Russell Sage Foundation (Helsinki, Finland)
Competitions
- COVID-19 DATATHON by TRIA AI — April 2020, 4th Place
Skills
Programming: Python · R · SQL · Bash · HTML/CSS · JavaScript · D3.js Methods: Network Analysis · Computational Text Analysis · Machine Learning · LLM Fine-tuning · Survey Analysis Tools: Git · Docker · AWS · LaTeX · Jupyter
Languages
English (Professional Working) · Turkish (Native) · Arabic (Limited Working) · French (Elementary)
References
- Nick Beauchamp — Associate Professor, Political Science & Network Science Institute, Northeastern University · n.beauchamp@northeastern.edu
- Dan O’Brien — Professor of Public Policy, Urban Affairs, Criminology, Northeastern University · d.obrien@northeastern.edu
- Tuba Unlu Bilgic — Professor of International Affairs, University of St. Thomas · tuba.bilgic@stthom.edu