EU Director, Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV)

Nilgün Arısan Eralp holds a B.S. degree in Economics from Middle East Technical University, M.A. degree in Economic Development from Leicester University and M.Sc. degree in European Studies from London School of Economics. Eralp worked as an expert in State Planning Organization, Directorate General for EU Affairs. Further, Eralp functioned as the Head of Department of Policies and Harmonization in the Directorate General for the EU Affairs at State Planning Organization. Afterwards, she served as the Director of the National Programme in the Secretariat General for the European Union Affairs (EUSG) until 2009. Throughout this period Eralp has been a Member of the Academic Board in the European Research Centre, Ankara University on behalf of the EUSG. Eralp has lectured at several universities on the EU as well as Turkey-EU relations and has several publications on the same topics and has been working at TEPAV since 2009 as the Director of the European Union Institute.

Prof. Dr. Ofra Bengio, Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and Head of Kurdish Studies Program at the Moshe Dayan Center. Her fields of expertise are the contemporary Middle Eastern history, modern and contemporary politics of Iraq, Turkey and the Kurds. Bengio also has a focus on culture and literature of Middle Eastern societies. She has translated poetry and prose from Arabic and Turkish into Hebrew. She was a visiting fellow at Emory, Beijing and Bogazici universities as well as The Washington Institute. Bengio is a frequently referred commentator in Israeli and world media. 
She has written numerous articles and essays in leading journals and collective volumes. She is the author of, among others, Saddam’s Word (1998), The Turkish-Israeli Relationship: Changing Ties of Middle Eastern Outsiders (2nd edition 2010), Türkiye İsrail: Hayalet İttifaktan Stratejik İşbirliğine (2009), Nazım Hikmet: Blue-eyed Giant (2009) or the Kurds of Iraq: Building a State within a State (2012).

Visiting Fellow, European Policy Centre

Andrew Duff was Liberal Democrat MEP (East of England) and spokesman on constitutional affairs for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) from 1999-2014. He was Deputy Chair of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee. Duff was a member of the Convention on the Charter of Fundamental Rights and of the Convention on the Future of Europe and, latterly, one of Parliament’s representatives at the IGC which drafted the Treaty of Lisbon. From 2008 to 2013 he was President of the Union of European Federalists. Before becoming an MEP, Duff was Director of the Federal Trust, London.

Prof. Dr. Meltem Müftüler-Baç is Professor of International Relations and Jean Monnet chair at Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey. She is a graduate of Robert College (1984), received her B.A in Political Science from Boğaziçi University (1988), M.A (1989) and Ph.D. (1992) in Political Science/ International relations from Temple University, USA. She worked at Bilkent University from 1992 to 2002; and as a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago.
Müftüler-Baç authored Turkey’s Relations with a Changing Europe, Turkey and the European Union Relations: Dilemmas, Opportunities and Constraints, co-edited with Yannis Stivachtis, and Diverging Pathways: Turkey and the European Union, Re-Thinking the Dynamics of Turkish-European Union Relations. Her publications appeared in numerous international outlets. She participates in several EU funded large scale collaborative research projects in Framework programs and received numerous grants from the EU both for research and teaching. Müftüler-Baç holds two prestigious awards from the Turkish Academy of Sciences: Young Social Scientist Investigator Award in 2002 and Distinguished Young Scientist Award in 2003. She was awarded with the Jean Monnet Professor ad personam title from the European Commission in 2004.