Assoc. Prof. DEFNE AKAY

Defne Akay was born in 1985 in Ankara. She completed her primary, secondary, and high school education in Ankara, and received her undergraduate degree from the Department of Physics at the Faculty of Science, Ankara University. She earned her MSc and PhD degrees in Physics from the Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences at Ankara University.

Defne Akay began her academic career in 2010 as a research assistant in the Department of Physics at Ankara University. She successfully completed her doctoral studies in 2016. In 2017, she was awarded a TÜBİTAK 2219 postdoctoral research fellowship and worked for 12 months with the “Quantum Transport and Spintronic” research group at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Regensburg, Germany. She received the title of Associate Professor in 2021 and was appointed to the associate professorship position in the Department of Mathematical Physics at Ankara University Faculty of Science in 2022.

Between 2021 and 2024, she served as the principal investigator of a TÜBİTAK 1001 research project, and since 2024, she has been a member of the Faculty Board of the Faculty of Science. She has also contributed to many significant projects supported by higher education institutions and served as the editor of the book titled Engineering on Energy Material. Since 2020, she has been serving as a Field Editor for the journal Gazi University Journal of Science Part A: Engineering and Innovation, which is indexed in TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM and other major databases. She acts as a reviewer for various international journals and has several publications in high-impact journals indexed in the SCI-Expanded. According to Web of Science data, her H-index is 13. She is fluent in English.

She is married and the mother of Ege AKAY.