Biography

Hilal Erkuş studied urban and regional economic development at Middle East Technical University (Turkey) and has finished her PhD at that university. She got her PhD grade in 2008 on local tourism development based on the perspective of clustering and level of networking in tourism firms and organizations which is supervised by Prof. Dr. Ayda Eraydın and her PhD thesis is awarded as the best PhD thesis of the year, given by METU. Later on, she worked as a Post-Doc researcher between 2009 to 2010 March at University of Amsterdam and collaborated with Dr. Pieter Terhorst on ‘Governance of Urban Tourism in Designing Tourism Development: Amsterdam, Antalya, Liverpool Compared’ and “Global Value Chains in Tourism Cities”. During her research, she has had various experiences on science policy of her country, Turkey, and science policy of other countries such as the Netherlands and the UK. In Ph.D.-Thesis writing process, she also joined an international COST A26 Project as a researcher between 2005-2008 under the main theme “European city-regions in an age of multi-level governance- reconciling competitiveness and social cohesion?”, “New Organizational Models and Development Strategies: The Development of Multi-Level Governance Models by reconciling competitiveness and social cohesion for newly developing City regions in Turkey”. This project developed her teamwork capacity.

She is currently working as a full professor at Akdeniz University, Faculty of Architecture, Department of Urban and Regional Planning. She studied on economic diversification and homogenization in tourism cities at Akdeniz University, and this 1001 project granted by prestigous institution, TUBITAK (Turkey Science and Technologhy Research Institution). In 2019, TUBITAK awarded this project by “Project Performance Award” according to the outstanding publications from her project. Later, she worked on economic resilience in crisis cities and factors defining firm survival strategies in crisis. This project was funded and awarded by The Science Academy (https://en.bilimakademisi.org/the-science-academy-why/) in Turkey as the first project awarded in the field of urban and regional science. She is awarded as a Member of Young Academy of Europe (YAE) by the advice of Science Academy of Turkey.

She was also awarded as a Outstanding Young Scientist Award given by Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA). By the support of TÜBA, she is currently working on future fictional expectations of (tourism) cities experiencing both economic, natural, political crisis and recently added also Covid-19 crisis to explain  possible changes in cities. In line with this framework, she works on fictional expectations for future (tourism) cities. Climate change is one of these risks and she wants to contribute on future strategies of cities after having various crises.

Apart from her projects and publication, she also contributed to Regional Science by collaborating with Regional Studies Association, UK. She tried to support academics in her field on regional studies and development.  In addition, she contributed to strategic plans of her university and worked as an outstanding member of Research and Development Commission of Akdeniz University (see http://argek.akdeniz.edu.tr/hakkimizda/kurul-uyeleri/) to stimulate international projects and publications for her university at the local level.

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