ACADEMIC
ACADEMIC
Lale Akarun elected Vice President of International Association of Pattern Recognition
Lale Akarun from Boğaziçi University was elected as the vice president of International Association of Pattern Recognition.
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“Understanding the molecular basis of symbiotic nitrogen fixation is the key to more sustainable agriculture in the future”
Modern agriculture completely depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, which are produced from non-renewable energy sources. These fertilizers currently support lives of ca. 7 billion people on Earth, but will be depleted within the next 150 years. Besides the non-sustainable nature of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, they destroy soil and water ecosystems and contribute to the greenhouse effect (global warming). The natural alternative to synthetic nitrogen fertilizers is symbiotic nitrogen fixation, which exists in limited evolutionary branches of the plant kingdom, notably in the legume family. Legumes can fix atmospheric nitrogen in cooperation with bacteria called rhizobia, which live in so-called root nodules. Unfortunately, most plants that constitute the human diet have no ability to fix their own nitrogen. The project supported by the TÜBİTAK 1001 program started recently at Boğaziçi University for understanding this natural nitrogen fixation mechanism in the model legume Medicago truncatula. Dr. Igor Kryvoruchko from the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and his team will realize a systematic functional analysis of alternative proteins involved in symbiotic nitrogen fixation in the model legume. Understanding the molecular basis of this process and using that information in plant breeding programs will uncouple the agriculture from synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the future. We conducted an interview with Dr. Kryvoruchko for the details of his project.
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Dr. Paolo Maranzana: “The production and circulation of pottery can reveal how people faced global crises in ancient times”
For understanding the long journey of humanity, archaeology has taken advantage of many disciplines ranging from natural sciences to social sciences. Modern technologies such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have also helped archaeology to locate the archaeological materials into wider contexts. Dr. Paolo Maranzana, who recently joined the Department of History in Boğaziçi University is conducting research that benefits from contemporary approaches to archaeology. In his project titled “Manufacturing Goods: The Case of Late Roman Pottery Production and Circulation in Western-Central Anatolia,” Dr. Maranzana will research how economic independence contributed to the survival of Late Roman cities (4th – 7th c. AD) in Central Anatolia in the face of large-scale crises that affected the Roman Empire. By using GIS, he will also visualize and analyze further the connection between production centers and the circulation of ceramic fragments in a broad region.
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Interview with Raja Abillama: A journey from sociocultural anthropology to sociology…
Raja Abillama joined the Department of Sociology at Boğaziçi University in 2019. Worked as an architecture for a short time and later trained as a sociocultural anthropologist at the City University of New York, currently he teaches courses on anthropology, secularism, and the Middle East in Boğaziçi University. Abillama answers our questions on his areas of interest, his teaching experience in COVID-19 times, the meaning of ‘’secularism’’ in Lebanese political context and the hard times that his home country Lebanon goes through…
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Juho Korhonen: ‘’Democracy as a political process is only meaningful if it has the capacity to challenge existing political structures’’
Assistant Professor Juho Korhonen joined Boğaziçi University Department of Sociology recently. After having experienced different academic environments and ‘’traditions’’starting from Finland, later Germany, Russia and USA, Mr. Korhonen says it was the right moment to join Boğaziçi University when he saw the job ad of Sociology Department last year.
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Boğaziçi University develops tool to diagnose Covid-19
Bogazici University developed a stethoscope which can analyze sound via artificial intelligence and diagnose lung diseases, including the novel coronavirus.
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Dr. Bora Akgün, researcher at CERN preparing to open a new lab in Boğaziçi University
Boğaziçi University accelarates the collaboration with CERN. Boğaziçi University alumni and a current researcher at CERN, Dr. Bora Akgün prepares to establish a new laboratory in Boğaziçi University with the cooperation of CERN and financial support by TÜBİTAK.
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An interdisciplinary way to get more reliable knowledge in empirical, social and behavioral sciences
The empirical, social and behavioral sciences like psychology have made significant advances in mathematical modeling, however all these fields have a common problem that we can call “replication / confidence crisis.” Dr. Frank Zenker, the principal investigator of “Models, Theories Research Program” and his team stress the importance of the fact that reliable scientific knowledge requires empirical research results that are replicated independently and propose to develop a new research program to solve the replication crisis in empirical, social and behavioral sciences.
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Boğaziçi University has switched to a flexible grading system for the duration of distance education
Within the framework of the measures taken by higher education institutions against the COVID-19 pandemic that continues in our country and in the world, education at Boğaziçi University resumed on April 6, 2020. For the spring semester, students will be graded by a Letter Grade or a Pass/Fail grade, if they wish.
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Boğaziçi University becomes member of iNavigate consortium
In the newly-funded H2020-MSCA-RISE-2019 project, Boğaziçi University Institute of Biomedical Engineering teams up with 25 academic and non-academic organizations in EU and USA to develop brain-inspired technological solutions for autonomous robotic mobility.
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A New Book by Jameson Kısmet Bell: Performing the Sixteenth Century Brain
The wonder of people to see what is inside their bodies has a long history and the human brain is among the most mysterious parts of the human body. Jameson Kısmet Bell, Assistant Professor in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Bogazici University, takes the issue of the representation of brain from the juncture of history and literary criticism in his book Performing the Sixteenth-Century Brain: Beyond Word and Image Inscriptions. By re-examining two books, Hans von Gersdorff’s Fieldbook of Surgery (Feldtbuch der Wundtartzney) and Lorenz Fries’ Mirror of Medicine (Spiegel der Artzny) Kısmet Bell is shifting the focus from the images themselves to their production and interpretation in the early sixteenth century.
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Boğaziçi University is among the top 200 universities in the world
Boğaziçi University has been ranked 186th among the Best Global Universities Ranking 2020 by US News & World Report. The rankings also show Boğaziçi University as “The Best Global University” in Turkey.
