Middle East Technical University

Description

Middle East Technical University (METU), founded in 1956, is an international research university which seeks excellence in serving the country, region and the world. The proof of concept of METU’s capacity to coordinate projects is given by the English Times Higher Education’s (THE) “World University Rankings Top 400 during 2012– 2013”. According to THE rankings of “Research (budget and reputation)”, “Impact of Research (citations)”, “Teaching and learning environment”, “Income from the industry” and “International dimension”, METU ranks 203rd in the world. METU is once again the only Turkish university which has entered the list of “Most Reputable 100 Universities of the World” by ranking in the 71–80 band in 2014, according to the Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuter. METU actively took part in and managed many projects under Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) following 2007, especially 7th Framework Programme, currently H2020, as well as other International Projects such as COST, Eureka, NASA, NATO, NSF, UN, UNIDO, UNEP, World Bank, etc.

Role In Project

Meryem Beklioğlu (f, PhD 1995 in freshwater ecology) is a professor in hydrobiology in department of Biological Sciences at Middle East Technical University in Ankara (METU) since 2007. She is the lead scientist of the Limnology laboratory at the Biological Sciences as well as the head of Ecosystem Research and Implementation Centre (EKOSAM). She is actively working on the impacts of hydrology changes, nutrients and climate change on ecosystem structure and functions of Turkish lakes through using different approaches including long-term monitoring, paleoecology (using multiple proxies of cladocere, pigments, diatoms, and plant macro- fossils) to space time substitute approaches. Moreover, She has actively uses in-situ mesocosms for hypothesis testing to develop mechanistic understanding through our her career. She has been coordinator and leader of many national and international research projects on structure and function of shallow lakes (e.g. the EU FP7 funded projects: REFRESH, WP2-co leader, MARS, NETLAKE- Cost activity, H2020 funded AQUACOSM). She has received both national (Turkish) and international (EU, Dutch and Greek funds) peer-reviewed funding. ISI WoS statistics: 73 articles, 2322 citations, h-index: 27.

Project role AQUACOSM: Co-Leader WP5: Outreach: Dissemination and Stakeholder engagement; Task Leader WP4.1: Data collection and processing; Task Leader WP5.4:Engaging with Education: Enhance European human capacity building in mesocosm-based sciences; Task Leader WP6.5: Provision of TA to METU: METU Mesocosm System; Task Contributor WP3.4 Perspectives beyond the project.

Project role AQUACOSM-plus: Lead: WP3: Task 6.2, WP9.3 Contributor: WP1, WP2, WP4, WP5, WP6, WP7, WP8, WP9