Arzu Odabaşı Sarı, General Manager
After graduating from Marmara University, Department of Public Administration in French, Arzu Odabaşı Sarı received her master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Toulouse, France in 2003, and started to work as a European Union expert at the Economic Development Foundation in the same year. She completed her second master’s degree at Marmara University European Union Institute in 2006. She focused on European Union funds and industrial policy, prepared and directed many sectoral publications and projects. She gave informative seminars on the EU candidacy process and funds all over Turkey. In 2008, she worked at the Brussels Representation of the IKV Foundation and participated in lobbying activities before European institutions. Between 2009 and 2014, she worked as a manager in charge of foreign trade and exports at Odabaşı Leather Ind. and a Member of the Supervisory Board of the Istanbul Leather Exporters’ Association.
Between 2014 and 2022, she took part in various administrative and academic levels at Boğaziçi University, leading the execution of international projects in the fields of agriculture, rural development and social sciences, and gave lectures on “Rural Development and Rural Tourism” in the Department of Tourism Management. She is also working on her doctoral thesis on Cultural Studies at Yıldız Technical University.
Nilüfer Sağlar Onay, Head of Research Projects
Nilufer Saglar Onay is an architect and academician with 20 years of teaching experience in the field of architecture. Currently she is an adjunct professor in Politecnico di Torino, Department of Architecture and Design in Italy. She has completed her PhD in ITU in 2010 and in 2011- 2012 she has run a post-doctoral research in the University of Florence, Department of Technology and Design focusing on interventions on historic buildings. She has been an associate professor in Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Architecture, Department of Interior Architecture until 2015. She has numerous international publications including books, book chapters, scientific articles and conference papers in the fields of architecture and interior design.
With her international background fed from different cultural environments, her main intend is to create a long- lasting international platform of sharing between institutions in terms of research, education and practice. Her research mainly focuses on the challenge of creating a balance between human and his environment and aiming these two to uplift each other in complete integrity addressing architecture and cultural heritage (both tangible and intangible) as the main source of transformation including social, economic and environmental levels.