Işık Tüzün

ERG Director

She holds a Master’s degree in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), located in The Hague. During her graduate studies at ISS, she majored in Politics of Alternative Development and minored in Poverty Studies.

Before joining the Education Reform Initiative (ERG) in Istanbul in 2007, she worked as a researcher at the History Foundation. Between 2013 and 2016, she served as ERG’s Advocacy and Training Programmes Coordinator, Acting Director and Education Observatory Director. During this period, her main interests included right to education, child rights, gender equality and freedom of belief and religion. Additionally, she served on the advisory boards of several NGO projects on human rights in education. She was an executive board member of the Network of Education Policy Centers in 2015, and she was part of the Preparatory Group on the Evaluation of the Implementation of the Council of Europe Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education between 2015 and 2017. Between January 2013 and August 2019, she collaborated with various national and international organisations as an independent consultant. Besides authoring research and/or policy reports on gender equality in education and refugee children’s right to education, she worked in several NGO projects, including Ashoka Foundation’s Changemaker Classrooms Project, CEID’s Monitoring Gender Equality Project and BBOM Association’s Participatory and Peaceful Classrooms Project. She rejoined the ERG team in September 2019.

She takes great pleasure in visiting stationery stores. She has been dreaming of crafting glass and making glass beads and objects for many years.