Ela Naz Birdal
Activist
As an activist for climate and gender equality and one of the founders of the international team Climate Live in Türkiye, 16-year-old Ela Naz Birdal has taken action to support the "She Changes Climate" campaign, which was launched in the UK to support and give a voice to women leading the climate movement in Türkiye. In addition to being an activist for gender equality with UN Women in Türkiye, she is also actively involved in campaigns, events and organizations in Youth For Climate Türkiye.
Entrepreneur
Eray Altunbozar set out to bring a flying car to Türkiye in 2017, and founded the start-up company AirCar Corp in Istanbul. After three years of work with a team of seven, he carried out a full-scale test flight. After graduating from university, Altunbozar worked in America for a year and then entered a master's program in sustainability at Harvard. He left Harvard in the final stages to start Outliers Notebook and AirCar, with Outliers Notebook offering a solution as a digitalizable
notebook and AirCar focusing on the production of electric autonomous flying cars. Altunbozar believes that the real turning point for Outliers Notebook will be the conversion of handwritten notes in the notebook to text.
Nuran Erden
Artist + Entrepreneur
Nuran Erden, a 60-year-old woman living in Germiyan Village, which is located in Çeşme district of İzmir, is making walls fuller of life with her drawings, whose main theme is "No to Violence!" and introducing her village to the world. In the past, Germiyan Village was not seen as a tourist destination, but Nuran has turned it into a brand with her drawings and has achieved the attention she targeted. She has not listened to what has been said to her on the path she has taken by painting chairs and has seen all the walls of the village as canvases. As a confident, self-assured, courageous, and entrepreneurial Anatolian woman, she engages in shepherding, farming. She calls herself “çizdirikçi” which means drawer in English.
Rabia Akbıyıkoğlu
Student + Guitarist
Rabia Akbıyıkoğlu, who is 21 years old, continues her musical journey on stage by playing electric guitar after starting with classical guitar. Rabia Akbıyıkoğlu, who performs with her music group called "Evening Group," consisting of women, wants to respond to those who always react against women in a job and try to overshadow their successes with her music. Akbıyıkoğlu, who continues to make music in response to the reactions she receives, attracts great attention on social media with her electric guitar solos. Along with the electric guitar, Akbıyıkoglu plays the acoustic guitar, ney, saz, and piano, and her group are attracting attention as the second group in the world consisting of women with hijab after the Indonesian group Voice of Baceprot.
Associate Professor at Boğaziçi University
She is a professor at Istanbul Boğaziçi University. She is the founder and director of the Antennas and Propagation Research Laboratory (BOUNtenna) and the Bio-Hybrid Systems Laboratory (AntennAlive). Her current research interests include antenna design for body area networks, implantable and wearable devices, biohybrid implants, and large-scale communication. She collaborates with researchers from various disciplines, such as chemistry, molecular biology, and genetics, in an attempt to link synthetic biology with electromagnetics. She received the IEEE APS Donald G. Dudley Jr. Teaching Award in 2022 and the "Excellence in Teaching Award" three times from the Boğaziçi University Faculty of Engineering. She is currently serving as the Chair of the IEEE APS/MTT/EMC/ED Türkiye Joint Chapter.