European Commission has awarded a Twinning Action grant to Koç University for the proposal “Building the Future: Excelling in Computational and Quantitative Social Sciences in Türkiye”, submitted by Associate Professor Erdem Yörük from the Sociology Department. The project has a budget of 900.000 Euros for three years, and Koç University will be the coordinator of a consortium by holding half of the grant budget. The idea behind Twinning Actions is that an institution from a widening country is twinned with two leading institutions from Europe for the purpose of developing human capacity in proposed domains. In the case of our new grant, Koç University Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities will be twinned with GESIS in Germany and ISI in Italy in the domains of computational social sciences and quantitative social sciences.

This grant will be an excellent opportunity for faculty members, post-doctoral researchers, Ph.D. students, master students, and undergraduate students to excel in the methods of computational social sciences and quantitative social sciences. For three years, there will be a large number of summer schools, winter schools, workshops, courses, training programs at Koç, GESIS, and ISI and exchange programs as well as conference participation. The grant proposal also includes plans to establish a Computational Social Sciences MA program at Koç.

For more questions, you can contact Associate Professor Erdem Yörük at eryoruk@ku.edu.tr. Erdem Yörük will inform you more about specific events, organizations, and opportunities as soon the grant is released. By now, given this new opportunity, we would like to encourage all faculty members and students to begin considering and engaging more deeply in quantitative and computational social science methods, which are expected to shape the future of social sciences at large.